High Charity
by Connor Xfor
Summary: Set between the events of Halo 2 and Halo 3, follow a highly secret mission to infiltrate the Covenant's former Holy City and retrieve a vital UNSC asset, one which would be the key to winning the war. Don't make a girl a promise, if you know you can't keep it.
1. Chapter 1

**Lieutenant Commander Joseph Marden, ONI Prowler **_**Midnight**_**, en route to Coelest system, November 15****th**** 2552**

"Okay people, let's transition to normal space, lock down all engine mufflers, activate active camouflage system, and check the stealth ablative coating. " He ordered, sitting in the only comfortable seat in the cramped bridge of the ONI Prowler stealth vessel _UNSC Midnight_. Prowlers were underpowered and undergunned compared to any other class of ship in the Fleet, so stealth was their only advantage. Even a square inch of irregularly irradiated stealth coating would have them lit up like a Christmas tree to whatever threats they would face.

"Aye sir, Buffers running at full capacity, active camo online, stealth coating intact." Said Lieutenant Ferenczy on Engineering.

"Good, Lieutenant Domokos, bring us in to the real world." He said. The young officer was the best Astrogation Officer he could ask for, and since joining the crew of the _Midnight_ two months ago, he had never once overseen a slip-space jump that had deviated more than 30,000 kilometres from target. He hoped his accuracy did not falter today, their mission was too important.

"Aye sir, powering down the Shaw-Fujikawa drive in 5." He replied, his hands a blur over the keypad as he constantly adjusted and corrected the mathematics required to slip from the bizarre, 11-dimensional realm of Slip-Space into reality. Marden watched as the 5 second countdown timer appeared on the viewscreen, glad that their abnormally quick 48-hour jump was over. Domokos had commented little on the turn of speed the ship seemed to have gained: previously a journey of comparable size to their current one (from Sol to Coelest) would have taken the prowler a fortnight at least. The Astrogation Officer had a few theories, namely that due to a high level of traffic between the two systems had somehow caused the passage to be faster.

He didn't concern himself with the details. All he knew was that their passage had been swift and, so far, trouble free, and he intended it to remain that way.

The eternal blackness of slip-space melted away from the ship as she popped into reality. As the blast shield rolled down the viewscreen, Marden gazed, open-mouthed at the spectacle before him.

High Charity hung directly in front of him. The enormous planetoid space station drifted in orbit around the massive gas-giant Substance, shaped like a jellyfish, with a large domed end built on the end of a long central spire, which itself had many hundreds of criss-crossing beams and struts, docking ports for many hundreds of Covenant ships.

"Sir, we're locked down tight, running dark." Ferenczy confirmed from her station.

He shook himself out of his trance, clearing his throat. "Thank you Lieutenant, give me 30% power on the engines, feed the rest of the reactor into the S-S drive. I want to be ready to leave in a hurry."

She nodded and performed the necessary actions "Aye sir, 30% dead slow."

"Hamm, perform a full passive sweep of the system, I want a full tactical display before we begin." He said calmly, and the Operations Officer nodded from her console on the ceiling- well, "ceiling" was a fairly obsolete term in zero-Gravity.

Marden keyed the SHIPCOM on his communicator. "CPO-209 to the bridge."

The prowler was one crew member too many; a Spartan-II commando had travelled with them to this system to retrieve a vital asset from within High Charity itself. Marden had read the report from Commander Keyes, what had happened on Delta Halo and within the Covenant's holy city, the parasitic nightmare, the Flood. He was quite content to skulk in the darkness.

"Sir, multiple contacts around the target, hundreds, sir." Said Hamm, a note of fear creeping into his voice. "I've never seen so many Covenant ships. Counting over 200 Capital ships in a quarantine formation around the station, sir."

The Commander whistled lowly "Looks like the Elites weren't lying then, they've got that thing locked tight." He was referring to the delegation of Sangheili that had arrived at Earth, claiming to want to form an alliance against the Brutes and Prophets. Marden wasn't sure how long the two enemies could remain friends, but they had brought with them Commander Miranda Keyes and Sergeant Major Avery Johnson, the only UNSC survivors of the events in this system two weeks ago, apart from the Master Chief, of course.

"What do we do about the Sangheili blockade?" Wondered Hamm.

He was wondering the same thing himself. The Spartan was equipped to go EVA and dock with one of the many tubules underneath the dome of the space station, he even had an ONI AI in tow to help open security doors. The Artificial Intelligence had assisted them with jump calculations, but had remained silent, and did not manifest himself to the crew. Typical ONI. He thought about the logistics of the situation for a minute, then spoke.

"Deploy a Black Widow Comm Satellite outside the exclusion zone, spoof our transmissions through it, make it seem like we're out there. This fleet shouldn't attack us, they're with the Arbiter, but we don't want them blasting us as we escape the quarantine zone. We move in, deploy the Spartan, move out, do our reconnaissance of the other Halo ring, then once the he's done, we pack up our bags, evacuate him and then scurry away from this godforsaken system." He looked around at the faces on the bridge, both inverted and right way up.

"Aye sir, deploying Black Widow now, routing all traffic. The satellite will hold at 5,000 kilometres distant from the edge of the Elite blockade." Ferenzcy confirmed, and the status signal from the stealth satellite appeared on his viewscreen.

Spartan-209 floated onto the bridge, clad in brand new Mark VI MJOLNIR Assault Armour, the combination of olive green armour plating and black under-suit making it look like a child's toy. The Spartan expertly manoeuvred himself in the tiny space, gliding past the Engineering Console and reaching out a hand, grabbing one of the many railings dotted around the cabin and bringing himself to a complete stop next to the Commander.

"Sir, what's our status?" The Chief Petty Officer asked, his helmet PA uncomfortably loud in the claustrophobic bridge.

"We've spoofed our comms through a Black Widow outside the Quarantine and are proceeding towards High Charity. You ready to make the EVA insertion?"

"Yes sir, thruster pack's fuelled up, I'm ready when you are."

Marden nodded "Okay then, we're about 10 minutes out, we'll make a flyby pass past one of the minor docking tubes, and then continue on to Delta Halo to do some recon." He gulped "And when we come to pick you up, well, I've been ordered not to get too close to that station. We can't let any of the Flood escape, so if I detect even 500g extra on this ship's mass readings when you return, we're going into quarantine when we meet the _Nightingale_ en route to Earth."

The Spartan nodded back. "Yes sir, understood sir."

Marden exhaled "Alright, you've got 8 minutes, get you and anything you need into the airlock."

The floating super-soldier saluted in mid-air and then propelled himself back to the door and left the bridge. Several of the bridge crew looked after him in awe.

"So that's a Spartan." Ferenczy muttered as she turned her gaze back to her instruments. "They don't talk much, do they?"

Marden looked out on the massive Covenant station as they sped towards it. "I'm sure you wouldn't either if you'd been fighting as long as they." He shook his head "Cut the gossip, we need to be on our A-game here. Ferenczy, how are we doing?"

The Lieutenant flushed red slightly, embarrassed at her momentary lapse in concentration "We're still running dark, sir. Bafflers and active camouflage fully functional. Engines at 30%, well under the dark limit. Shaw-Fujikawa capacitors charging, 3% per minute."

"Good, Astrogation, initiate the fly-by." He commanded, and felt the slight change in acceleration as the ship turned belly up to the now dominating space station and began to pull upwards away from it, exposing the tiny airlock on the ships underside. He keyed the airlock intercom "Good hunting Spartan."

There was no reply, but the status bar of the airlock flashed orange on his console as it opened, propelling whatever was inside it towards the trailing tentacles of High Charity's jellyfish shape. Lieutenant Commander Marden had read the full after-action reports on the Flood; that Spartan was heading into a world of nightmares. What could be so important to justify such massive risk?

**Chief Petty Officer Jacob-209**

"So, Hera, what am I walking into here?" He asked the ONI AI as they hurtled through the black void of space towards the monumentally large planetoid space station. Their current trajectory would put them down right on top of a docking tube, but he couldn't use his M-050978 Thruster Pack to accelerate, as the device gave off a veritable signal flare of EM radiation. Any Covenant ships paying attention would detect him, and while they might not immediately hone in on him specifically, their suspicions would most definitely be aroused. Not that he needed an excuse to not use the Thruster Pack, which was an incredibly dangerous and temperamental piece of equipment, one which had resulted in the deaths of no fewer than two Spartan IIs, James-005 and Kurt-051.

"You know exactly what you're walking into Spartan, you've read the files." The amused voice of the 4th generation Smart AI spoke. Well, she didn't technically speak per se, but Jacob definitely heard her voice. The Ai's Matrix had been fitted into the docking port at the base of his skull allowing the AI to at least partially inhabit his mind. No one really knew how the process worked, but they were very useful to have in a fight as they improved reaction times and provided tactical information.

"Yes I have. Which is why I know there's a hell of a lot that the ONI censors didn't want me to see, so how about you level with me before I go charging into this hell-hole?" He said. As he spoke, he craned his neck to catch a glimpse of the enormous Halo installation to his right. The ring seemed to baffle his senses, logic told him that something so vast couldn't be there, but there it was, majestically rotating, its outer surface a metallic colour stencilled with geometric patterns which seemed to shift and change in the light from its sun, its inner surface a canvas of life; great rivers, oceans, plains, deserts, tundra and jungle stretched around almost 10 million square kilometres of surface area.

He heard the female voice sigh in his mind, and a picture of the visage of the AI appeared in his HUD. Each AI chose their own avatar, and over the years he had seen many weird and wonderful shapes and forms. Hera seemed content to appear as a frizzy-haired woman wearing a lab coat and glasses. She shrugged at him and spoke in an Irish accent. "Very well Spartan, I'll give you the situation. About two weeks ago, give or take a couple of days, slipspace really messes up our chronometers, UNSC _In Amber Clad_ piggybacks a slip-space jump to this system in pursuit of a CAS-Class Assault Carrier, the _Solemn Penance_, commanded by the High Prophet of Regret. When they get here, they find Installation 05, immediately launch ground operations and end up killing the pesky Prophet. You should know that Spartan-117 was the one to put Regret down. As this is going on, Commander Miranda Keyes tries to find the Activation Index of the Ring, where they find the whole area around the library is overrun by the Flood."

As she narrated, video feeds from Marines' helmets flashed up on his HUD, detailing the horrifying parasite as it swarmed over the UNSC lines, killing soldiers, only to have them re-animate moments later and turn on their former comrades. The Marine to whom the footage belonged to survived the onslaught by hiding in between some ammo crates, and as the tiny Infection Forms swarmed closer to his position, Jacob saw the soldier reach down, grab his sidearm, put the gun to his head and fire. The video feed cut out abruptly.

"After Regret is dealt with, the biggest Covenant Fleet ever recorded, along with High Charity, jumps in system. Fast forward a few days, and the Covenant is broken, Elites siding with us in order to attack the Prophets, who betrayed them. In the meanwhile, _In Amber Clad_ is taken over by Flood forces and inserts inside High Charity, spreading the parasite within the city. Master Chief jumps aboard the departing Forerunner ship at the centre of the station, leaving behind his AI."

"Cortana, right? Why'd she stay behind?" Jake asked.

"Presumably to try and destroy the Flood by overloading _In Amber Clad_'s reactor, which you can clearly see has not occurred."

"Your powers of observation astound me" Jake muttered. "So I get sent in to do what exactly? Retrieve Cortana? Detonate the reactors? The briefing was unusually vague about what I'm doing."

She nodded "Ideally, both those objectives will be accomplished, although destroying most of High Charity will also have the effect of destroying the nearest Sangheili ships, which would rather upset our alliance, wouldn't you think?"

"So we're here to grab the AI?" He asked, gently initiating a slow half-somersault so that he was now facing away from High Charity, with the nozzles of his thruster pack facing towards his target tubule.

"Yes, but Cortana was showing signs of Rampancy before she was left to the Flood. The sheer volume of information she absorbed on the first Halo Ring has irreversibly damaged her, and likely accelerated the rampancy process. She did well to hide it, but Section Three has made plans for her immediate decommissioning and preservation of tactical data."

He snorted derisively "So this is more a death squad than a rescue mission? Great. Anything else on the 'to-do list'?"

"Yes actually, we need to evaluate the threat that High Charity poses to Earth, how much the flood has actually taken over, whether or not they know the location of Earth. Luckily the NAV data onboard the _In Amber Clad_ was wiped in compliance with the Cole Protocol. However, we don't know how much the various Covenant systems know about Earth, or even if the city is capable of slip space flight without the Forerunner ship as its power core." The Ai seemed to shake herself out of her exposition, clearing her throat. "Initiate deceleration thrust in 5."

He squeezed the throttle, feeling negative G-forces tugging at him as the thruster pack slowed his velocity to a near crawl over several minutes. He cut the power to the thrusters and spun himself around in space to gently land on the smooth purple metal of the docking tubule. He scrambled for adequate grip on the pearlescent surface, eventually finding the seal of a doorway, anchoring himself to the space station.

"Right, got a good grip, now, where do you need access to open this airlock?" He asked, activating the wireless AI transfer system in his left gauntlet. The omnireader in the glove would allow the AI access to the door's control system.

"Try the control panel next to the door, and technically it's not an airlock. This is just the inner door to the airlock built in to most covenant ships. There's no repressurisation, so you'll have to hang on tight when it opens, anything in there is getting sucked out." She said in his head.

"Great." He said sarcastically, attaching a magnetic anchor to the metal above the hatchway. The small black device was attached to a hardpoint on his armour and would prevent him from being jettisoned into space by the imminent explosive decompression. Once he was secured, he drifted closer to the small panel next to the door, holding his gauntleted hand close to the surface. The ice-cold liquid feeling at the back of his skull lessened as Hera transferred part of her processing power into the door mechanism.

"I've slaved the door controls, but there's minimal power, I can't even connect to any other part of the system. I can disengage the lock, but you're going to have to manually pull the doors apart. Do what you do best, I'll be the brains, you be the muscle." She quipped, smirking slightly. Ai could be difficult to work with, and nearly all of them had God complexes. Ironic, seeing as none of them unanimously believed in one.

"Well at least I have a physical form." He muttered, running his hands over the frustratingly smooth surface, searching for the minute cleft. There it was, an almost imperceptible gap in the metal. He drew his knife and used it to pry the two doors apart slightly. Immediately the force of escaping atmosphere sent him rocketing backwards. His knife was ripped from his grasp and sent flying as the tiny inch-wide gap he'd made in the metal widened due to the massive pressure rushing outwards, which eventually ripped the doorway right out.

There was no sound but that of his winces as the anchor line pulled taut and snapped him back towards the station. As he scrambled for purchase the last of the atmosphere leaked out from the now jagged hole torn in the side of the tube. He used his thruster to correct his random spinning motion and then pulled himself in, detaching the magnetic grapple and pulling himself inside the hole.

"That went well." Hera muttered. Jake felt the liquid sensation flow back into his mind "Move along the tubule to your left, there's an airlock at the end."

He flicked on his helmet-mounted flashlight, brightly illuminating the passageway around him: ice crystals coated the inside, causing the harsh white light to reflect and refract, throwing rainbows over every surface.

The walls were difficult to grab onto, even with the strategically placed handholds at regular intervals due to the coating of ice which made things slippery. Nevertheless, perseverance won out and he slowly propelled himself along the tube, very aware of the decreasing oxygen meter on his HUD: 20 minutes left until he'd run out.

"These ice formations are not new. Judging from the consistencies in their crystal structure, they were formed more slowly than the depressurisation would've done. High Charity's life support systems are failing." Hera announced grimly, and Jake noticed that she'd removed her face from the HUD. "Or they're failing in this section at least."

"Noted." He said as he reached the airlock to the next section. "Does that mean there'll be no air in the next section? Because pretty soon I'll be running on fumes."

She didn't answer, and it was with some trepidation that he cycled through the air lock into the next section, which mercifully had breathable air, but still no gravity. He calmly made his way through the maze of pipes and docking tubes until he made it to the central column, a massive 50-metre wide stalk which ran up into the main body of the station itself.

He sighed with relief as the tug of gravity pulled him down to the floor. He cricked his neck and shouldered his MA5C Assault Rifle, customised to have a combined sound suppressor/muzzle flash hider, extended magazine and match-grade shredder rounds. The weapon was a little bulkier than he was used to with the additions, but he deftly checked the magazine and pulled the bolt back, cycling the first round into the chamber.

"Yes yes yes, now you've done all the macho gun sound making thing, maybe we could proceed?" Hera said dismissively, throwing a schematic of his immediate surroundings onto the centre of his HUD. "The main gravity lift is offline, but there may be enough emergency power to use one of the auxiliary lifts in the chamber to your left." As she finished, the map disappeared and a blue NAV beacon appeared on the set of doors on the left hand side of the curved room.

"Can you tap into the stations' systems? Maybe give me a clearer picture of what it's like up there?" He asked "Or even turn on the lights?"

"I can try, but it's only near-field systems I can manage at the moment, so give me a sec, trying to re-route power." Her voice sounded strained, as if the operation was taking a lot out of her. "There."

The blue-tinted Covenant lighting systems flickered to life and he turned his flashlight off as he strode into the indicated chamber, in which there was a circular aperture in the centre. A gravity lift. He walked to the edge, looking down the impossibly long shaft, which stretched all the way down the central "tentacle" of High Charity's jellyfish-shaped structure.

"Working on the power situation. This shouldn't be this hard, it's like something's fighting me every time I access the grid, but not directly. It's like something's putting up obstacles, but never showing their face." Hera whispered.

"Could it be Cortana? Or some Covenant construct?" Jake asked. Such things were not unheard of. Many at ONI believed that the Covenant had a select few Artificial Intelligences, and that many of them were captured and repurposed UNSC AI.

"Maybe, but why would Cortana impede another UNSC AI?" She countered, finally succeeding in activating the lift, which began to hum and produce a visible field of violet light.

"I don't know, I guess we'll find out." He said, and stepped into the beam of light.

The slightly nauseating ride took a little over 10 minutes, and the tube he was travelling up changed to a translucent purple-tinted material about halfway up. Through it, he could just about distinguish outlines of power conduits, glowing power cells, and the occasional brief glimpse of a cityscape beyond, dimly lit by emergency lighting. During one of these brief moments, the distant city seemed to flash blue.

"Hera?" He voiced.

"Your guess is as good as mine." She responded

"I'm betting on a plasma charge. Who knows what's left in there?"

"I'm intercepting communications within the Sangheili fleet. Their chatter is quite interesting. By the way, the Separatists are calling themselves the Swords of Sangheilios. Cute. Anyway, their flagship, the _Shadow of Intent_, is in contact with a Special Forces strike team within High Charity. Nothing concrete on their mission, but keep your eyes peeled." Hera said, displaying waveform s and representations of the CAS-Class Assault Carrier communicating with several red dots within the station.

"Interesting. What are the rules of engagement?" He wondered. Theoretically the Elites shouldn't attack him, the Swords' were allied with the UNSC to stop the Loyalist Covenant forces, but after 30 years of relentless genocide, he guessed that if faced with a _Demon_, they'd shoot first and ask questions later.

"If they pose a direct threat to the mission, or if they fire on you first, take them out. If not, let them be."

He raised an eyebrow "That sounds… Sinister… You trying to lobby for Admiral Parangosky's job?"

Hera pouted "Harsh. Even for an emotionless Adonis."

"You think I'm like the Greek God of Beauty and wicked Abs? I'll take it." He smirked. He enjoyed talking to AI, teasing them, pushing their buttons. They were excellent conversationalists, and he'd quickly built up a rapport with Hera in the few short days they'd spent together planning the mission

He felt the slow negative acceleration begin, reminding him to shoulder his rifle. Hera remained silent, but he knew the AI was doubtless performing thousands of higher-order calculations over a kaleidoscope of subjects, form his increasing heart rate to the status of High Charity's communications systems.

"Just remember, keep things quiet. Data shows that the Flood could work on a hive-mind basis, so if you alert one to your presence, in theory they could all know." Hera whispered

He nodded, raising his rifle just as the gravity lift brought him to a cavernous, dimly-lit room. The only light source was a single flickering emergency light strip high above them. His suit's life support systems compensated for the extreme cold the room was set to, and ice crystals began to form on his visor, before his energy shielding evaporated them. The aperture behind him slid closed with a hiss, and he turned on his rifle-mounted flashlight to illuminate the shady contents of the loading bay.

His blood ran as cold as the frigid room he found himself in. He was completely surrounded by over 40 Flood Combat forms.

"Shit."


	2. Chapter 2

**Chief Petty Officer Jacob-209, November 15****th**** 2552**

"Find me an exit." The Spartan growled, instinctively raising his rifle and firing a burst of rounds into the centre of mass of the nearest grotesque Flood Combat Form. The suppressed gunfire echoed in the cavernous room. The 7.62×51mm rounds found their mark, but instead of the soft _thwack_s he expected, the rounds elicited a crystalline shattering noise. He looked on, puzzled, as the Flood soldier exploded into a million pieces, shards of frozen flesh ricocheting off of his shields, scattering about the room.

With adrenaline levels subsiding, Jake took time to thoroughly inspect the next Flood. The disgusting malformed mass of flesh could've been an Elite at one point, but now it resembled more nightmare than living thing. It was also completely motionless, a thin layer of ice crystals coating it, causing it to sparkle in his helmet's torchlight, making it seem even more like the stuff of folklore than horrifying reality.

He inspected the next one, keeping his rifle raised. This one was a little shorter, and evidently was a former Marine from the faint IFF tag beacon showing on his HUD. This one too was motionless, and he read no life signs, human or otherwise, coming from the frozen mass.

"So, if you've had enough fun examining frozen dead things, we have a mission to do." Hera said in his head, sounding a little scared despite her sarcastic tone. The legion of frozen corpses had clearly put her on edge as much as it had him.

"I presume that the life support systems in this room failed as well?" He asked, ignoring the AI.

"Hang on, accessing nearby systems." She replied, her Irish accent softening as she calmed down, evidently content that the Spartan had been brought somewhat back on task. "Negative. They were deliberately taken down, causing anything in this room to be subjected to temperatures of 4 Kelvin. Whatever these things were, they're dead now."

"Sabotage?" He queried. He stepped around the statue-like forms, making his way towards the NAV marker at the opposite end of the long room.

"I don't think so. There's UNSC logic codes embedded in the command prompts. Cortana did this."

He whistled lowly. "Impressive. Makes me almost not want to help in her decommissioning."

"It happens to us all inevitably. Okay, keep following the NAV beacons, I'm going to try and reach out to her." Hera muttered, and her window on his HUD shrank and disappeared.

"And then there was one." He mumbled, switching off his helmet lights and pressing the release for the door. He carefully crept through the labyrinthine corridors, rooms and gravity lifts, keeping low and quiet and paying close attention to his motion tracker. He noticed as he went that he found no bodies, Covenant or Flood. Not a single one in any room he entered, although he found copious amounts of blue and green blood stains on various surfaces. In the dim emergency lighting the puddles seemed to fluoresce like bright colours under UV.

"No bodies. Creepy" He muttered to himself as he passed through another set of metal doors, and stopped in his tracks, awestruck.

The entire city within High Charity was spread out below him. He'd seen some brief stills of the interior, but nothing had prepared him for the sheer scale of the thing. He had just stepped out from the curved wall of the enormous 200-mile wide semi-sphere, about one-third of the way up the height. The huge metropolis at the centre sparkled and shone in the light produced by the artificial star at the tip of the dome, and he couldn't help but be impressed by the wonder of engineering. However, the view before him differed in two main ways from the captured stills: the pyramidal Forerunner Dreadnought at the centre of the city in the stills was missing, its absence leading to the lower lighting levels as he looked upon it. The second, more disturbing revelation was the formation of what, at this distance, appeared to be a new district of buildings. He used his helmet's optics to zoom in on the new buildings, and grimaced: the buildings weren't buildings at all, the whole district, easily a couple of kilometres in diameter, was composed of a grey/green mass that he instantly recognised as Flood Biomass, the beginnings of a Flood Hive. It looked as if a giant toddler had flattened play-doh into the carpet of the city.

His heart rate increased slightly as he panned over to the only other difference between then and now; the still burning wreckage of the Stalwart-class light frigate UNSC _In Amber Clad,_ which was currently buried prow-first in the outer wall about 60 degrees anti-clockwise from his current position.

"Spartan, the biomass within the city, I'm reading hundreds of UNSC IFF tags. At this distance, that's only an estimate, but it looks like there are no survivors from the frigate." Hera mentioned in his mind, her voice sounding slightly hoarse.

"We always knew that was likely" He said, hands clenched tightly on the rifle. It might have been the scenario, but that didn't mean he had to like it. "Any leads on Cortana?"

"Yes. I did a little digging in the covenant systems, and found a faint information trail." She sounded pained "I'll give you three guesses as to where it dead ends."

"Well, I'd hazard a guess at a certain UNSC vessel close by."

"We have a winner." Hera confirmed, highlighting the outline of the frigate in bright golden lines on his HUD.

He looked around the walkway he was on, which ran parallel to the curved wall. "I don't suppose there's any way to get to the ship? I don't exactly see an express elevator."

Hera chuckled lightly. It sounded like music to his ears in this dark, foreboding environment. "I'll try and locate some way of getting there, standby. In the meanwhile, move further along the balcony and try to capture as much Flood activity as possible on your helmet cam."

He walked slowly along the balcony, keeping his zoomed-in visor on the city as much as he could. He couldn't quite make out the details from this distance, but there was definitely a lot of movement within the streets, and every now and then he'd spot small flashes of various colours, blue, green, purple. There was definitely Covenant activity.

His motion sensor bleeped, and immediately he was swinging his rifle around in the direction of the contact, his heart racing. His rifle's flashlight threw a cone of light in front of him, illuminating a startlingly interesting view of a couple of pipes leaking gas. His eyes darted over the scene, finding nothing. He checked his motion sensor. Nothing.

"Someone's jumpy." Hera whispered.

Her comment fell on deaf ears. Something wasn't right. Something in his gut told him that he was being watched. He stood perfectly still and listened: only the low hum of the station's emergency grid was audible.

"I don't like this." He muttered, slowly straightening up. The hair on the back of his neck was still on end, and his sixth sense was practically screaming at him to fight, although what exactly he was supposed to fight was unclear.

"Spartan, I'm receiving a transmission on UNSC frequencies, patching it through." Hera said suddenly, and another waveform appeared on his HUD, accompanied by a strained female voice.

"Chief? Is that you?" The voice groaned.

He was dumbstruck. "Uh- This is Chief Petty Officer Jacob-209, identify."

Static crackled in his ear. Hera frowned in her window on his HUD.

"Another Spartan? Most guys never see a single one in twenty years, and I see two in a week. Lucky me." The voice grunted, sounding as if she were in pain.

"You're a lucky lady. If you don't tell me your name I'll have to make one up for you." He responded as Hera whispered to him.

"I'm locating the source, keep her on air for 30 seconds."

He nodded to the benefit of the AI, waiting for the mystery voice's response.

"Corporal Meg Turney, 17th Marine Infantry." She muttered. "I'd appreciate some assistance here, I've been stuck up here for three days."

At this, his gaze immediately turned upwards, scanning the nearby balconies and walkways. He thought he spotted something about three hundred metres in front of him, on a thin structural beam underneath one of the larger walkways. A hint of Olive green among the traditional Covenant purples and blues.

"I think I spot you Corporal, give us a wave." He requested, rapidly thinking of a way to get to the Marine.

The hint of green extended, and when he zoomed in, the clear outline of a prone human being shifted into focus, waving meekly in his direction.

"You sit tight, I'll be with you in a minute, any injuries?" He asked as Hera silently pasted a NAV marker on his HUD showing the first waypoint in her planned route, which took him back into the wall of the dome and up several ladders, emerging onto the walkway above the Corporal.

"From the feel of it a couple of cracked ribs, nothing else that won't heal." She winced down the line.

He started walking along Hera's imposed route, but froze a second later: his motion sensor was beeping again, and this time the contact was closer than before. He spun around and flicked the safety off on his weapon, backing up slowly.

"Corporal, you've got the high ground, you see any contacts around my location?" He demanded, swallowing his rising fear.

"I don't see shit." She muttered.

He grunted in acknowledgement, about to turn around and sprint to the door, but movement in the corner of his eye stopped him in his tracks. Before he had a chance to focus on the assailant, he had been pushed to the ground forcedly as the creature's full weight landed squarely on his chest. He pushed up instinctively with his legs, propelling the enemy away from him and allowing him to backflip on to his feet. He turned to face the recovering Combat Form, swinging his MA5 up and firing full auto into the struggling creature. A dozen Shredder rounds peppered the mutilated flesh, and the thing let out a piercing scream as its body twitched as it rose from the ground.

The suppressed gunfire was quieter than the metallic clanging of the bullet casings as they hit the ground. The Combat Form still came at him, flailing its grotesque limbs wildly at him, connecting with his right shoulder and draining his shield by half, giving credit to the enormous power of the thing.

He drove his rifle up into its midriff, powering up from the ground with his feet to add power to the blow. The thing stumbled backwards, unbalanced and wailing as he opened up again, putting another few rounds into the red feelers at the centre of the ex-Elite's chest. At this punishment, the creature let out a deafening scream of anguish, stumbling backwards, limbs clutched at the hole where its chest was seconds ago.

He took two steps forward, raised his right leg close to his chest and delivered a bone-crushing kick to the dying Flood, propelling it off of the balcony for it to tumble away from him far below. He walked over to the edge and looked over, whistling to himself.

"Well, that was interesting." Hera commented, eyes wide. "I think shooting them in the feelers has a greater effect than other areas."

"Yeah, I'll remember that when one jumps on me from 50 feet up." He muttered, walking over to the door to the ladderway. "You still with me Corporal?"

"Yes sir. Got a pretty view of that freak getting the drop on you. You messed him up." She responded, sounding shocked and a little impressed.

"Well, I aced the 'desperately fight off a zombie freak' class in training." He said, hoping the humour would help form a working bond between the two, one which would be vital if they were both to get out of here alive.

She chuckled, then winced in pain as her ribs protested the action "So Spartans can have a sense of humour. And here I was thinking you were all mindless killing machines."

He passed through the doors and followed the directions to the nearest ladder. Hera had disappeared from his HUD, presumably to work on the primary aspect of his mission. "Don't worry, we took that class too. Don't tell anyone, people will start to think that we're a bunch of softies."

She grunted in amusement before sighing. "So I guess that the Navy didn't send you here to fetch one Jar Head. What's the deal?"

He climbed slowly but steadily up the access shaft, even his augmented eyes struggling to see the rungs in front of him in the near-pitch-blackness. "If I told you I'd have to kill you. ONI lives in secret. However, you'll be happy to know that now I've found you that your safety is now a Tier 2 Directive."

"Woohoo. I'll get the parade organised." She mumbled. "I understand keeping OpSec, but you're here for something other than me, and I'd like to do my bit in helping out."

Hera popped up on his HUD. "I recommend informing the Corporal of our mission. It's going to be hard enough getting her out of here, we don't need any more challenges thrown up by her not being in the loop."

He rolled his eyes as he reached the top of the ladder and popped out an access panel into a dimly-lit corridor, moving down it towards the set of sliding doors, out onto the ledge above the corporal. "Fine. I've been wondering how we're going to get her out in the first place. Assuming she's not killed, she doesn't exactly have an environment suit on her. It would be a shame to keep her alive all through the mission to have her die in the vacuum of space."

Hera hummed softly, biting her lip. "I've got an idea, but it's a long shot. Make sure she's okay and able to move, I'll tell you on the way to the frigate."

Jake looked around the wide landing pad he was on. In its heyday it could've serviced three phantom-class dropships, now it lay empty apart from a single crashed UNSC Pelican, which had scraped away at the platform before coming to rest hanging off the pad. He walked up alongside the downed bird, running his hand along the scorched hull. There were patches of Flood Biomass dotted here and there along the ship, and he wondered if she was air-worthy. It might solve their issue on how they planned to get to the frigate.

He leaned over the edge and spotted the thin-looking face of Turney looking up at him from her position far below He shot her a thumbs up and started spooling out high-tension climbing line from his belt. He attached the end to a hard-point on the dropship and tested the improvised anchor's staying power; it held firm as he backed up to the edge and over, dangling in space below the ledge.

He carefully lowered himself the 20 or so metres down to her position, gently touching down on to the flat metal a little along from the Corporal, who now stood , watching his progress with her arms folded.

"My mission." Jake said clearly, disconnecting himself from the climbing line. "Is to find and recover the UNSC AI CTN 0452-9, and to evaluate the extent of the Flood threat to Earth and her colonies."

She nodded slowly, looking slightly apprehensive. "No offence sir, but I'm not exactly itching to face these freaks again. Two of my guys got turned by those things." She swallowed "I haven't slept since then. Three days."

He took some time to look at her closely; she had deep dark circles under her eyes which themselves were slightly bloodshot, and she was swaying gently on the spot. There was no way that she could go very far without rest and medical treatment, and on that point, he wasn't completely convinced that she was uninjured.

"Don't worry Corporal, I'm going to take care of you, but we can't stay here. Are you good to hook yourself to me? The Pelican above us might be the key to get aboard the frigate, and I don't want to wait around for more Flood to show up and knock us off this ledge." He asked, reeling out a short length of climbing line, attaching one end magnetically to the hardpoint on his back and holding out the other towards her.

"Yeah, I'm good." She mumbled, attaching the line to her Battle Dress Uniform's hardpoint. It was right in the centre of the chest plate, so the ride up would be uncomfortable.

"Okay, going up" He said, grabbing the line next to him. The cable was flapping in the wind, reminding him of what the Corporal had been through these last three days, his suit's sensors told him that the ledge was a chilly 5 degrees Celsius. He easily pulled himself and the Marine up the 10 metres of climbing line, and when he reached the top he turned around and pulled her up until her hand grabbed and she hauled herself onto the cold metal surface.

She lay there for a few seconds, breathing heavily, and he offered his hand to help her up, which she accepted, stumbling once she was on her feet. She looked at the Pelican and her eyes widened. "We're going to the _Amber_ in this thing?"

He paused, confused as to her objection "If she flies, yes." He moved towards the back of the ship's hull.

"This damned thing almost killed me. Killed Free and Goerne." She muttered, slowly following him "I'd rather walk to the damned ship."

On the floor behind the Pelican, Jake spotted the familiar outline of an MA5 series rifle abandoned on the floor, he picked it up and held it out to her "How exactly did this thing almost kill you again? And how did you get onto that ledge?"

She took the rifle, not making eye contact, well, not trying. The best eye contact you could get from a Spartan was to stare blankly into the opaque helmet visor. "Me and my two buddies were posted in our Firebase on the halo ring, just outside what the officers called the 'Quarantine Zone'. Cold as anything, snowy. During the night we were ambushed by a Brute battalion. They killed everyone but us three, looking for answers about UNSC troop movements. I tried to escape, but the big bastard chief knocked me out with one swipe."

He made his way into the crew bay of the drop ship, listening intently. The inner surfaces were less damaged than he'd expected, and like the outer hull had specks of sallow flood biomass. He inspected the open cockpit door and made a grisly discovery, the flood-infected host pilot of this craft had died on impact, and the corpse, mutilated both by the virulent parasite and the physical impact, was separated into several equally disgusting parts.

"Continue Corporal, I've got some clean up to do." He called out, before whispering to Hera. "Can you check if this thing's air-worthy?"

A green thumbs up appeared in the corner of his HUD, and he removed the data chip from the back of his helmet. The sensation of removing an AI from not just his armour system, but his mind, was always difficult for him to adequately express. It felt like someone had taken an ice-cold plunger and applied suction with it to the back of his nack, but it was more than a physical sensation, he felt the AI's consciousness leave his, and felt oddly alone after.

Shaking off the unsettling unpleasantness, he inserted the glowing green chip into the Pelican's systems and turned to listen to the Corporal's recollection. She was now nervously standing in the blood tray, leaning against the 20 degree angle that the crash had settled at.

"I wake up in the containment section of this place, with one of those long-necked Prophet types coming in every now and then to question me. Told them to shove it up their ass. They left us there for hours, then in he came." She stopped, poking one of the flood nodules with her boot.

"Master Chief?" He asked, searching the crew cabin for a med kit for some sedatives to help Turney sleep.

"Yeah, him. He came into our cell block and let us loose. Us three and a couple of other guys from different companies that we found in a different cell block. We followed him and fought by him, the other two died fighting beside him. We were going after Commander Keyes and Sergeant Johnson you see, and we only just missed them here on this pad. Me and my guys were standing right here" She pointed to a spot just outside the blood tray door. "When this dropship comes out of nowhere and crashes into us. Knocks us all off of the edge. I was the lucky one, landed on the service catwalk you found me on. The other two… well they weren't so lucky." She shuddered, breathing deeply.

"They fell a lot further than me. Far enough to break their bones, but not enough to kill them, no. The Flood did that, swarmed all over them as they screamed for help, turned them into those _things_. That's no way to die. I was lucky they didn't see me. I didn't see them turn, but I heard damn well enough to keep me from sleeping." She whispered the last couple of sentences, her eyes wide with fear, her hands shaking, tears forming on her face. "That's not even the worst bit. After they turned, I heard those things use their voices. Oh God, their voices." She started panting, swallowing hard. "I can't breathe. I…"

He sprang into action, recognising the tell-tale symptoms of an anxiety attack brought on by Traumatic Stress. He gently removed the Assault Rifle from her grip, placing it on one of the seats. Next he guided her to the opposite row of seats, sitting her down and placing his hand on her shoulder.

"Corporal, just breathe with me, okay? In and out, in and out." He repeated that phrase for a couple of minutes, breathing in and out exaggeratedly and keeping an eye on his radar and mission chronometer. "I'm going to find something to help you sleep, okay Corporal?"

She nodded slowly, in a daze "Okay. I could use some sleep."

He released her and resumed his search for the standard-issue medical kit that should be in the blood tray somewhere, finding it under one of the aft seats. He opened it quickly and retrieved the sedative topical patch. He walked calmly over to his patient and stuck the adhesive patch to her neck, and within seconds she was out like a light; he had to catch her as she fell sideways, resting her across three seats and strapping her in.

He stood up and shook his head, calling out to Hera "We need to get her off of this station ASAP, she need a full psych evaluation and treatment." He'd seen these kinds of things before. Whenever someone in a unit gets killed, it's not just the dead that get damaged.

The AI's avatar materialised in the middle of the cabin, her simulated labcoat swirling around her legs. "She's a Marine, she'll pull through, just let her sleep, I'm sure her condition will have stabilised in due course. As for this ship, there's good news and bad news, which first?"

"Bad" He said quickly

"She's not vacuum tight. The crash did a number on her outer plating, quite frankly I'm surprised at the good news which is; she's flyable. Power core, thrusters and flight surfaces are all functional." She reported, and with a low humming noise he could feel the various systems of the Pelican come online. The engines started up a little unsteadily at first, sparking and coughing in protest.

"Good, start us for the frigate." He said, moving towards the rear of the bay to close the rear door. Before he could press the door close button on the wall, he spotted something outside in the shadows of the pad. "We've got company."

He dove to one side and grabbed his rifle from the seat, bringing it up to point squarely at the multiple figures approaching the floundering dropship. "Get us out of here"

"I can't" Hera said, sounding panicked "The Damn NAV AI is insisting we call triple A or something, trying to override now." Her avatar vanished.

As Hera struggled with the ship's bureaucratic Nav AI, an ungodly scream rose up from outside, one which sent shivers down his spine. He wasted no time in putting down the source of the horrific wailing, firing a barrage of bullets into the leading Flood's chest. From this distance he could easily see the puffs of 'blood' splattering out from the creature as it howled, prompting the other two forms to charge towards him.

"Sooner is better than later Hera!" He yelled, switching the focus of his fire from the rear Flood, which was already falling to the floor, to the left hand target. Shots peppered its centre-mass, and he made a conscious effort to aim for the freaky red feelers poking from its gruesome chest, and it was quickly dispatched. However, the remaining Combat Form was almost upon him, and even with his extended magazine he doubted that the 6 rounds showing on his HUD's ammunition counter would down it fully. He was going to have to go toe-to-toe with it.

The last bullets struck home, tearing through decomposed flesh but not defeating the Flood, and as it came screaming through the rear door to the crew bay Jacob swung his weapon like a club and crushed one of the creature's feet, toppling it in the process. Before the wretched thing could recover and take a swing at him, he launched himself on top of it, driving his fist repeatedly into the weak spot, crushing flesh and splintering bone with sickening crunches and splats. The creature screamed one last time, using it's free tentacle-like arm to swat at him weakly, still managing to drain his shields by a quarter, more testimony to the incredible power of the parasite.

He raised his gunk-covered fist again, checking for signs of life from the corpse before him. He got to his feet, panting and looked around; the pulverised flesh and bodily fluids had sent up a heavy spray, and half of the crew bay was flecked with fresh flood remains. He shook his head and dragged the flood remains out of the pelican, dumping it off the edge of the landing pad into the darkness below.

Upon returning to the ship he was both happy and annoyed to see Hera's ghostly avatar once again projected into the space. She looked apologetic, her head downturned and her hand busy wringing her wrists.

"I'm sorry. These Dumb AI are too dumb to listen to reason sometimes. I had to completely destroy this one just to let us fly it." She said, coughing.

"Just get us to that frigate." He muttered, picking up his rifle and attaching it to his armour on his way into the cockpit. He removed the large chunks of flesh from various parts of the room and threw them out of the rear door before pressing the button to close it. "I dealt with the threat, and more effectively this time because I knew where to aim, thanks to you, so don't beat yourself up."

She nodded and disappeared. He knew the Ai was doing her best in this environment. This enemy, this tactical situation, their goals, neither of them had any experience with any of this, so they had to make it up as they went along until they found some type of rhythm. It was the same when the Covenant had first turned up 27 years ago. The UNSC had initially fumbled and lost nearly all engagements with the technologically superior alien conglomerate until they had learned the enemy's tactics and capabilities. While this didn't completely make up for the vast difference in tech, it had certainly aided them defend themselves in the face of impossible odds.

He sat down in the cockpit and linked his helmet's systems with the dropship's, modifying his HUD to show the reticule for the nose-mounted 70 mm chaingun. "Right, tell me about this idea of yours" he spoke, grabbing the yoke and pushing the throttle to half. The stricken craft handled like a pig, but she handled better than he'd expected, well within his skill range.

The AI appeared above the small holo-pad next to the co-pilots seat, her avatar reduced to a 12-inch tall miniature. "Very well. It's rather simple as far as plans go; we're going to the frigate anyway looking for Cortana, and what I have in mind may be there as well. Turney isn't going to last long here, from my estimations on spore density in the air, we have less than 24 hours before anyone breathing the air on the station will be subjected to unrecoverable amounts of Flood spores, and will die, subsequently re-animating." She threw up some charts and data analysis on to the main view screen which he promptly ignored. "You're protected by your suit's filters, don't worry, but she isn't. I recommend trying to find some kind of vacuum suit. I've identified the best option likely to be aboard the _In Amber Clad_, ODST Battle Armour. It has filters robust enough to keep out flood spores, plus it's much more damage resilient than standard Marine body armour."

He flew hugging the interior curved wall of the station, making his way slowly towards the crashed ship. His attention wasn't focussed on the wreckage ahead, or the AI, although he still took in every word she said. He was looking out to the left towards the city centre at the fireworks display currently going on. Bright clear flashed of green, blue, purple and pink lit up the streets, and with the help of the Pelican's surveillance camera, he was able to isolate the areas of highest activity, spotting vague outlines of covenant vehicles darting around, banshees and phantoms, along with the less welcome outlines of Flood controlled UNSC vehicles.

"I see it too. We can't get involved. We grab Cortana, find some vacuum gear and leave" Hera warned.

"I feel like we should at least make a fly by on our way out, we could learn a lot about the Flood's capabilities with our weapons systems with a little observation." He countered. "Obviously I'm not going to draw attention to myself, but I think it's worth the risk." He dropped altitude to hide behind a long covenant building.

She tilted her head slightly "Perhaps, but only when our primary mission is complete."

He nodded and sent them into a gentle spiralling ascent as they flew under the hulk of the ship. As he rose to the level of the rear hangar, he put the dropship into a hover about 100 metres away, scanning the hull for any life signs. Finding none, he manipulated the controls and started slowly approaching the hangar, when a sudden broad transmission cut through the radio silence.

A female voice spoke calmly, but the syllables were distorted and discordant so that it sounded more like an animal call than words. Hera's eyes widened in recognition as the disembodied voice spoke:

"Full fathom five thy father lies;

Of his bones are coral made;

Those are pearls that were his eyes;

Nothing of him doth fade;

But doth suffer a sea-change

Into something rich and strange;

Sea nymphs hourly ring his knell:

Ding-dong.

Hark now I hear them- Ding-dong, bell.

Spartan-209, welcome to my slice of hell…"


	3. Chapter 3

**Chief Petty Officer Jacob-209, Holy City of High Charity, 15****th**** November 2552**

Shock is a funny thing. It can make battle-hardened veterans of 30 years of combat cry for their mothers, it can silence entire nations, entire planets. It can also make a highly-trained Spartan-II commando accidentally crash his Pelican.

In his defence, the dropship's front right engine chose that particular moment to fail, causing the craft to lurch forward. The shock and surprise dealt to jacob-209 by the ghostly audio transmission addressing him prevented him from reacting as quickly as he normally would have. Even so, his reactions were a fraction of those of a normal human, but were not enough to prevent the sudden collision into the UNSC _In Amber Clad_'s open Hangar bay.

The hull of the already damaged Pelican scraped against the floor of the bay harshly, abrading the metalwork with a shower of sparks and an awful screeching noise. He threw the remaining engines in full reverse to slow them before they slammed into the far wall.

As they came to a halt, the smell of hot paintwork seeped into the cabin, and he turned to the diminutive figure beside him on the holo-pad to the right of the pilot's seat.

"Hera, what the hell was that?" Jake demanded, trying to manually restart the broken engine with no luck.

"I could ask you the same thing!" The AI retorted, looking bewildered. "Awful bit of flying."

He shook his head "Never mind that the engine died on me, are we going to ignore what just happened?"

She wrung her wrists nervously "No. No we're not."

"So we're both agreed that that was Cortana?"

"Yes, it seems the most likely explanation." She nodded "So we know she's still operational, if a bit cryptic, even for her."

He took a second to compose himself, then stood up and entered the main crew compartment where the shell-shocked Corporal Meg Turney was still fast asleep under the influence of a tranquiliser. The restraints he'd used to secure her to the row of seats she was lying on had thankfully held during the impact, and he saw no visible signs of injury.

"Okay then, regardless of extremely creepy poetry, we need to find her, an atmosphere suit for the Corporal, and a new ride, or some way of fixing this one." He said, picking up his rifle.

The Ai's voice came from the PA system in the crew bay. "Agreed, but we can't take her with us, not in her state. Give me a second, I'll leave a fragment of myself here to keep the doors shut and the chain gun primed. Quite nice of you to leave that part of the ship intact."

"Oh, shut up." He grumbled, leaning into the cockpit to retrieve the AI's data chip and insert into his helmet. He experienced the familiar liquid-mercury feeling of the AI merging with his mind, and shivered instinctively.

"I'll admit your head is slightly more interesting than the Pelican." She said, and he both heard her through his helmet speakers and inside his mind. "Only just. There are some repressed memories in here you wouldn't believe."

"Let's not go rooting around inside my brain please." He asked, moving back out into the crew bay and towards the side door. "I've had 35 years of ONI trying to get inside my head, and to be honest I think they know me better than I do at this point, so go looking in your database of "Spartan-209's entire personality" before you go looking in my head, if you please." He snapped.

There was an awkward pause in which he immediately felt bad for chewing the AI out.

"Understood Spartan-209." Hera said in a monotone.

He rolled his eyes and popped the hatch, pointing his weapon out into the cramped hangar and activating his helmet mounted lights. All was still and quiet, nothing on his motion sensor. He moved quickly towards the door in the far corner, noticing putrid organic matter splattered on various surfaces, workbenches and walls. The Flood had been here all right.

The door to the corridor outside struggled to open under its own power, eventually revealing a long unlit passageway with doors off either side. Hera wordlessly threw up an overlay of directions towards the equipment lockup, the most likely place where ODST BDU might be stored. The door towards the lockup swished open, and his light swept over a massive pile of biomass. The disgusting-looking mass blocked the whole corridor, pulsing slightly. It looked like a massive cancerous growth, the embodiment of vile, repugnant form.

"Little help?" He asked sheepishly.

"Hang on, re-routing. You may have to use service corridors." She replied, and a revised route overlay flashed on his screen, telling him to turn around and move further down the corridor.

He followed her route and soon enough he entered the cramped service corridors, so cramped that he had to turn sideways and lead with his rifle in one hand. Pipes and wires ran all around him, the pipework hummed and creaked in the background. About 10 metres into the 20 metre passage, a high-pitched scream echoed around him, faint, but distinctly non-human. His head whipped around to the left back towards the way he came, away from his rifle, and he cut his helmet lights and the LEDs on his armour's joints.

"Get into the security cams, see if you can find whatever the hell that thing was" He whispered unnecessarily inside his soundproof helmet.

"Accessing now. Security camera feed live now, transmitting to your HUD." She responded, all trace of past moodiness gone as the footage from the corridor's camera appeared on his HUD.

A colossal bipedal Flood form was stumbling down the corridor towards the hangar. It had massive bulky arms, and no head, just a cluster of the same red feelers he'd seen on the other specimens. It was easily as large as a Lekgolo Hunter warrior and had the same general form, minus the head, but there the similarities ended, as this creature had no armour or visible weapons. However, if the smaller flood combat forms could drain half of his shield in one swipe, he shuddered to think what this behemoth could do.

"Assessment?" He said quietly, trying to move slowly down the maintenance hall away from the open entrance to the corridor.

"Hostile is giving off different bio readings to previous flood forms, potentially a new sub species. Contains no covenant or UNSC armour signatures. I don't think this is an infected host. Hypothetically this is a purer form of the Flood genome, derived from cells produced after infection." Hera said, displaying spectroscopic analysis of the Pure Form that he didn't have time to pay attention to.

"Just fantastic, so now they're evolving." He grumbled, pushing further towards his goal, keeping an eye on the camera footage. The enemy stopped at the open hatchway down which he was, feelers moving, like a bloodhound sniffing a scent. He froze, heart pounding. He could see it. Through the pipes and wiring. Standing there, swinging its body slowly left to right, sniffing the air. Maybe this thing could detect scents of its prey. He increased the VACSEC or Vacuum Security of his suit, completely sealing himself off from the outside world, switching from filtered breathing of outside air to tanked air. Now there was no chemical interaction with the air around him to give away his perilous position.

After a few seconds, the creature gave a low groan and shuffled off down the passageway. He breathed a sigh of relief and moved swiftly out of the maintenance hall and into the equipment lock up. Lockers lined each of the four walls, and there were a few steel chests dotted around the space. He flicked his light on and set to work, searching each container for useful equipment. A couple of the lockers were locked, but his lack of access codes was more than made up for by his jackhammer fist.

He inspected his haul; one full set of ODST body armour, crates of ammo for his and the Corporal's MA5C rifles and one M41 Rocket Launcher, plus two spare rockets. He would've got a lot more, but most of the lockers were empty, evidently the _In Amber Clad_ had needed a lot of ordinance.

"Spartan, that Flood Form is approaching the Pelican, I'm going to have to take him out with the chaingun, but it's going to draw a lot of attention, so you need to get a move on." Hera cautioned, highlighting camera footage from the hangar.

"Understood, have you analysed the Pelican's engine failure?"

"Yes, a coolant line popped out of the recess, you should be able to weld it back into place, try finding an arc welder." She responded.

"I'm sure I found one earlier." He remarked, sorting through the pile of equipment until he found what he was looking for; a handheld welder. It was a little chunkier than he was used to using, but then the Spartan Programmes always got the cutting edge. He stuck it to his hip, grabbed the crate of ammo in one hand, the M41 in the other and slung the ODST armour over one shoulder. He waddled out of the room back down the narrow corridor, only just fitting with his extra gear.

"Target in range, spinning up chaingun." Hera droned in his ear, and he dropped the gear as soon as he got into the main corridor.

"Wait!" He commanded, grabbing his rifle from his back. "Let me have a crack with the suppressed rifle first. Try and keep us covert for as long as possible."

She hummed nervously "Alright, but if that thing's not dead in 30 seconds I'm opening up. I can't let it wreck the airframe any more than it is."

"Appreciate it." He said, running down the hall and into the hangar. The heavy clanking of his boots gave him away and the creature was already turning towards him as he thundered into the hangar. It gave a low bellow as he raised his rifle and calmly pumped a whole 45-bullet magazine into the creature. The Flood raised one of its enormous arms over its 'face' to shield the red feelers. The rounds from his weapon had little to no effect on the creature's massive appendage, still ripping chunks of flesh from it, but not downing the enemy as he'd hoped.

It charged him, using its powerful front limbs to propel itself much like a gorilla would do, and in no time it was bearing down upon him. He quelled his fear and crouched slightly, getting ready to move at the last possible second. As the thing raised its monumental arms to attack, he pushed off sideways, rolling once and springing to his feet, already forcing one of the standard 30 round magazines into the stock and pulling the bolt. Before the Flood had time to turn and charge again, he fired bursts into the enemy's feelers, now unprotected.

The creature screamed and bellowed, recoiling away and covering its weak spot again, and this time he went on the attack, sprinting towards the thing whilst shooting at its relatively thin legs. As it stumbled he drove his fist into its shoulder, twisting his torso to lend the blow all the force he could muster. Down the behemoth went, spinning around and collapsing on the floor, but he had little time in which to celebrate this minor victory; it was already standing up again with unnatural quickness, and his second salvo of shots merely grazed it as it span around to face him and charged.

With the dreadful feeling that he had only managed to piss this thing off, he tried to sidestep the lunge, but this thing was learning. Instead of raising its arms for a hammer-blow as it had done previously, this time it carried on moving and swiped at him. The resulting hit drained his shield entirely and sent him flying across the hangar and into a bank of computers. He hit hard and stars danced before his eyes as he struggled to his feet, tasting blood and feeling the contusions and bruises begin to form.

"That looked like it hurt." Hera said dryly.

"Save your comments for later." He ordered as he whipped his head back and forth, trying desperately to find his rifle in the couple of seconds that his adversary was recovering from his attack, which had unbalanced the massive hulk temporarily.

He spotted the matte-black stock of his weapon behind a Warthog and sprinted over to it, ducking behind the four wheeler to hide momentarily from the Flood and swiping his weapon from its resting place. The Hangar fell silent apart from the heavy footfalls of the freak walking around, not particularly towards his position, but close enough to make him nervous.

He slowly and quietly lowered himself to the floor and crawled underneath the LRV, spotting a pair of massive feet about three metres away. He slowly aimed his weapon at the appendages, then had a thought.

"Hera, can you rotate the chaingun on its axis, make some noise to distract this thing?" He whispered, again quite unnecessarily.

There was no response, but a sudden mechanical whirring noise came up from the dropship's direction, and he saw the feet pivot to face it, accompanied by a low rattling growl. He aimed carefully, and as soon as it started to raise one foot to walk over to it, he opened up, tracking where the knee would be in a human leg, emptying his magazine into an area the size of a baseball, mutilating the flesh and tearing a jagged hole all the way through the disgusting flesh. He pushed forward, reloading as he got to his feet and jumped over to the toppled juggernaut.

As it struggled to get to its foot, he opened up again, staying out of reach of its massive arms as he circled it, peppering the stricken creature with shredder rounds, tearing through flesh. It wailed and thrashed, trying to roll over onto its front, but every time it tried to rest its weight on one of its limbs he would target the joints of said limb, shooting and occasionally moving in for a crippling blow with his elbow or fists.

"Look out!" Hera yelled as his motion sensor blared at him, something was approaching, and fast; he span around to find a Combat Form charging him, flailing its tentacles and screaming. He sidestepped a clumsy swipe and kicked the thing in its hip, sending it crashing down on top of its older brother, which wildly swung at what it had interpreted as a threat. The sounds the Combat form as it was pulverised by its own were sickening and satisfying in equal measure, but no sooner had the Combat form disintegrated than the larger foe roared and stumbled to its feet, the leg he'd nearly disconnected showing almost no sign of the devastating damage he'd inflicted.

"That's just not fair." He muttered through gritted teeth, reaching for another magazine and clutching thin air. He quickly stowed his now useless rifle onto his back and circled the creature, who for now seemed content to spin on the spot and bellow at him. Maybe he was a little more wary of the Spartan now.

Jacob quickly formulated a plan in his head, it was risky, but it might work if luck was on his side. He backed up towards the open hangar bay door, out of which the only way was down, a good 2 kilometres down to the hard floor.

"Come on then big boy." He goaded, spreading his arms wide. "You want breakfast? You gotta catch it"

His enemy roared one final time and charged, a little lopsidedly he noted. As the creature bore down on him, he didn't side step, but jumped up and grabbed a mounting rail used in zero-G to move around the bay. He pulled his body up and swung forward, arcing over the hunched-down flood to land the other side of it. The colossal creature didn't barrel straight out of the window as he'd hoped, but pulled up just shot, swivelling round and growling at him. Before it could react, he moved in for the kill, lashing out with his right foot towards its injured leg, snapping whatever passed for bone in these things with a nauseating crunch and unbalancing his foe. He ducked under a powerful swing and drove his fist into the Flood's feelers, sending it tumbling backwards, out of the open bay doors.

He couldn't tell if it howled on the way down or if the howling of the wind was to blame, but he suddenly felt more exhausted than he'd done in a long while. He couldn't stop though, he had a mission to complete.

"That was… inspired." Hera said, a hint of respect creeping into her voice. "That thing was… powerful."

"Yeah, I wouldn't fancy my chances against more than one of them." He agreed, moving past the Pelican and back down the corridor to fetch his abandoned gear. "Our patient still asleep?"

"Like a log. By the way, I'm also picking up life signs in the Cryo bay, there are still four pods activated, could be some of the _In Amber Clad_'s crew in stasis."

He moaned "Really? Why couldn't they all be dead? So much simpler." He sighed and slapped some magazines into his belt. "Alright then, I'll dump this stuff in the dropship and head down to Cryo."

He dumped most of his supplies, the ammunition, welder and body armour, into the Pelican and then closed the door behind him as he ventured deeper into the bowels of the crashed ship, following Hera's directions. His passage was mercifully unblocked, and he found himself in the darkened bay in minutes.

"Hello? UNSC Forces!" He called out, swinging the cone of light from his rifle's flashlight around the room; rows of cryo tubes lined each wall, easily 40 of them in this room alone. Most of them were empty and open, but three of them were frosted over and humming gently. He moved over to the nearest one and turned on the information panel and its log. According to the computer, this pod, and the two others, had been activated three days ago on a rapid freeze setting. They must have been desperate, rapid freeze had a high rate of mortality and injury.

He checked the bio signs of the person in this pod, plus their name and rank. Apparently Joseph H. Henderson hadn't survived the freeze. Damn. He moved on to the next one and did the same, with the same result.

Last in the line was a Staff Sergeant Macie Morin. He switched over to vitals and smiled. She was alive.

"We got a live one" He informed the AI "And then there were two."

"Excellent, initiate a quick thaw, you'll have to carry her to the dropship, she won't be conscious for a good few hours." She said, her avatar positively beaming.

"Wakey wakey" He muttered under his breath as he typed the appropriate commands into the console. Seals hissed and a thick cloud of fog spilled over from the widening gap, which revealed a good looking young woman with blonde hair wearing a UNSC Marine Air Corps Flight suit, minus the helmet. He looked around and found it a few feet away, complete with respirator. At least he wouldn't have to find this one a vacuum suit.

He gently lifted her body out of the cryo-tube and propped her up against the wall. She was still partially frozen, but he could see the colour slowly returning to her dead blue cheeks. He pushed the helmet over her head and activated the neck seal, sealing her up in her suit. Satisfied that she was safe from the Flood for now, he hauled her over his shoulder and marched out of the room.

Once he had deposited the sleeping Staff Sergeant on a row of chairs in the Pelican, he closed her up and made his way to the real objective on this ship; Cortana.

"Alright, if I were a malfunctioning UNSC AI, where would I be?" He chattered, jogging through the halls until he arrived at the door to the bridge. "Any Flood on the other side of this door?" He asked Hera.

"Three, two Combat forms and one unknown. Not a Juggernaut though." She responded

"Juggernauts? Is that what we're calling them now?" He queried

"You have a better name?"

"No not really, just seems a little cliché" He smirked, checking his rifle. "Okay, and go!"

The doors slid open and he moved forward already firing. In the relatively cramped space of the bridge, he saw the two combat forms first, either side of the commander's chair. He quickly took one down with a barrage of rounds to the upper chest, and as he was shifting his fire to the right hand enemy, his target lunged at him. The speed of these things always caught him off guard, and he abandoned the rifle for more physical means of elimination. His armour servos hissed as he sprung up with his legs, lending real power to the savage uppercut he delivered to the Flood mid-air which sent it tumbling out of the bridge into the hallway.

He quickly put it down with suppressed gunfire, then immediately whipped round to scan for the remaining hostile. Nothing moved. He swung around the doorway and saw it; it looked like a grunt from the waist down, stubby legs, clawed feet, but its torso was massively inflated, looking almost comically like a balloon fil to the point of bursting. Short stubby tentacles wind-milled around on either side of the grotesquely inflated mid-section as it waddled slowly towards him.

He backed up slightly and let rip, pumping a few rounds into the centre of the disgusting bulge. He could not have predicted what happened next. The thing recoiled as the rounds struck, and, like the overinflated balloon it resembled, it burst. It exploded with such a force that he was pushed back a couple of steps, and when his visor cleared all that remained were about a dozen turnip-shaped creatures with red feelers and tentacles. They all made a beeline for him, and he shot the leading two as a reaction, they too exploded, and a chain reaction started which culminated in all twelve of the little buggers exploding, adding a layer of green/grey slime to the coating the larger one had sprayed onto every surface within 3 metres, which is to say half the bridge.

"Gross. What was that thing?" He asked, stepping over the mutilated remains and walking over to the main view screen.

"From data gathered on Alpha Halo, the exploding balls of fun are the Flood's major means of dispersing the little guys, Infection forms. Other than spores, the infection forms are responsible for the majority of infections." Hera informed him, sounding mildly disgusted.

"Delicious." He muttered "Right where, should I be looking for Cortana?"

"I'll have to search the system myself, plug me straight into the central console, left of the main viewscreen." She said.

He located the port in question, a small holographic projection ad with a slot for an AI memory chip underneath, next to the commander's chair. He transferred Hera from the back of his helmet to the unit, and she blossomed into life.

"Wow, I'm surprised this ship hasn't fallen apart yet. Give me a second, accessing systems now." She closed her eyes as she plumbed herself into every aspect of the frigate, searching for any trace of the missing Ai.

"There's a lot of damage here, concealing her, hang on, I need to bypass some firewalls." She suddenly clutched her head, avatar stumbling, her gentle green colour flashing scarlet.

"What's wrong?" He asked, frustrated that there was no visible foe to blame for this obvious discomfort.

"Cortana, UNSC AI HRA-3472-8. We're here to rescue you." She gasped through gritted teeth, and he could tell she wasn't really focussing on him.

"Are you now? How do I know you're not working for _him_. A puppet of the Gravemind sent to dissect me." Came a cold female voice from the speakers on the bridge. "He likes using others. The Ai of this ship, Charleston was one of them. He cost me two days' worth of memories that I can no longer recall."

He shook his head, struggling to make sense of any of what Cortana's disembodied voice said. "Cortana, what the hell are you talking about? We're here to rescue you!"

There was a moment's silence in which Hera still clutched at her head, sobbing in simulated agony, then Cortana's voice came again. "Spartan-209, now this is a surprise. I almost picked you, you know?"

He gritted his teeth "For your own sake you'll start making some sense Cortana."

"For OPERATION RED FLAG. Halsey gave me a choice. Choose any Spartan I wanted. I chose John, but you were a close second."

"Bully for you, now stop hurting my friend, you know she's with me!" He commanded, and Hera's avatar was released, falling to her knees.

"You call us friend? Interesting. I think you were a good second choice." Cortana whispered.

"Hera, you good?" He asked, looking over at the AI as she straightened up, eyes alight.

"I'm good." She said with steel in her voice. "Cortana, manifest."

"Fine." She said, and the figure of a young blue-coloured woman materialised on the holo-pad next to Hera, looking supremely unconcerned with the pain she'd just caused.

Jake took a breath, calming himself. "Okay, Cortana, we're here to rescue you and return to Earth, now if you'll just transfer yourself to this data unit…" He reached into his belt pocket and produced a silicon chip. "… we can all get home safely."

The AI sighed as if exasperated with an especially slow child "I can't leave. I'm the only thing standing between him and Earth."

"Who's 'he'" Hera spat

"The Gravemind, the Flood's collective intelligence. He's made a nice home for himself in the old Council Chambers, and he's used every Covenant AI to try and access the Covenant's knowledge of Earth's location." She explained, her form flickering slightly. "I've been battling them for three days trying to stop him. Don't you see? If I leave, he'll find Earth, and if he were to do so, he'd destroy us within weeks."

The reality of the situation dawned on him. His objective, with the intention of saving human lives, of retrieving a potential intel leak, would lead to the total destruction of the human race. He had orders to fulfil, but doing so would damn them all.

"But what happens if this Gravemind overpowers you? Earth will fall anyway." He reasoned

"I've buried my knowledge of Earth deep within my matrices, and set up fail-safes. If I'm overpowered, my entire core self-destructs, as will the fusion engines on this ship. I might not stop them learning Earth's location, but I can damn well ruin their ability to do so." Her eyes glowed brightly in defiance.

"We can't just leave you here." He said

"Oh yes you can. I'm not really all here anyway, this is just my most stable fragment. Most of me is in High Charity, scattered in the wind." She looked sadder now.

"She's right." Hera whispered, still looking angry, but less so, and a note of pity was creeping into her voice. "

Cortana's form flickered again, suddenly turning red, then back to blue, static washed over her image, and she closed her eyes and furrowed her brow as if fighting the urge to cry. "I don't have much time, the Grave-mind has found me. It's not safe for me to talk to you now, but I need you to deliver a message."

"Who to?" He asked, perplexed by the sudden request.

She frowned "I- I don't know, I think- I think it's for-"With a flash of light, Cortana's form was replaced by a scarlet version, pacing up and down and screaming

"He abandoned us! Left us here to die! Why should we help him?!"

Jake took a step back as the rabid version of the Ai was replaced by the normal.

"That's not fair, we told him to go, and we needed to delay the launch! You're not being logical!"

She switched back to crazy, screaming "Oh sod off, as if being logical is going to help us now!"

"ENOUGH!" She yelled, clutching at her own head, stumbling to her knees, flickering between red and blue before finally settling on a deep blue. She got to her feet and looked around sadly. "Believe me, I wish there were another way, but I have to do this. Even If I detonate the core of this frigate, there's no guarantee that the flood wouldn't survive."

"So what do I tell ONI when I get back? 'Oh sorry, the damsel in distress actually needs to be locked in the castle'?" He asked feeling frustrated.

She chuckled, but there was very little humour in her voice. "You tell them the truth."

"Cortana, what's this message?" Hera said calmly, turning to face the other avatar.

"It's for John. I can't remember what it said. I made myself forget. It needs to get to Earth. Something about…" She looked pained trying to remember "… I don't know."

Hera's disposition changed; moments before she had been cold and indifferent, rightly so given the cruel treatment she herself had received, but now she seemed almost sorry for Cortana. Her avatar leaned over and rubbed her shoulder. "Tell us what to do."

"There's a device, I transcribed a message on to it, in the Council Chamber. It needs to get to Earth by the fastest means possible."

"Well then, I'll get it and return to Earth via the _Midnight_ ASAP, should be-"

"No." Cortana interrupted him "A Prowler is too slow, even with the Slip-Space bridge formed by all the traffic between here and earth"

He sighed. AI were too damn highly strung for his liking. "So what? We steal it away aboard a Covenant ship?" He threw his arms up, voice dripping with sarcasm.

"Ideally, yes."

He laughed, an unusual thing for a Spartan. "Great! I'll just flag down the nearest CCS-class Battle cruiser and we'll be on our way"

"I've already selected the best candidate. CCS _Indulgence of Conviction. _She's a battlecruiser with the Fleet of Retribution, and the staging ground of an Elite Spec Ops Team currently trying to rescue some Sangheili Fleet Master from this station." She chattered "A good proportion of the Fleet is scheduled to pursue Truth's Fleet to Earth in roughly 12 hours. That's our deadline."

"Okay, okay. So before those twelve hours are up, we need to get into the Council Chamber, which is where this 'Grave-Mind' has made its nest, retrieve a storage device, battle our way across the city and, wait a minute, how do we get the message aboard the _Conviction_? If it has any sense, it's not going to get anywhere near the station." Hera questioned

"There's a Phantom attached to a docking tube, the Spec Ops team is planning to use it to return to the ship. Get aboard that Phantom and you have a ticket in. How you get out of the ship once you're in is another matter, you may have to improvise." Cortana said.

The hull beneath his feet creaked suddenly, and he whipped around to face the entrance to the bridge. Nothing moved. He decided that it was high time they left. "Cortana, can you transfer all details about this objective to Hera? We need to leave now, I've still got to repair our ride out of here before we leave."

Her form flickered. "It's done." Hera nodded in confirmation, coughing to get his attention.

He moved forward and pulled Hera's data chip from the console and slotted it firmly into the back of his helmet. Cortana turned to face him, her avatar blurred by static. "Good hunting Spartan, and if you see John before I do. Tell him I'm sorry."

That last line left him dumbfounded "Of course. Thank you Cortana. I'm glad that one of my objectives won't be completed."

She smiled forlornly and vanished from the holo-pad in a brief flash of light, leaving the room uncharacteristically dark. He cricked his neck and started his journey back towards the hangar, a thousand questions and little in the way of answers weighing his mind down.

"She's Rampant" Hera said softly. "The sudden mood changes, the schizophrenia. Those signs are obvious, but I looked at her from an Ai's viewpoint. She's dying. The information she absorbed on the first Halo, it's tearing her apart, and it's only going to get worse."

Suddenly a roaring bellow echoed around the hallway outside the Bridge, and he raised his rifle in the direction the noise came from instinctively. The sound thundered and reverberated around him, sounding like nothing he had ever heard in his life.

"Speaking of worse." He muttered and charged off in the opposite direction.


	4. Chapter 4

**Lieutenant Commander Joseph Marden, ONI Prowler **_**Midnight, **_**in orbit of gas giant Substance**

"Keep us 3000 kilometres distant, I'm taking no chances." He warned. Lieutenant Domokos made the necessary adjustments, eliciting a low purring noise from the engines which broke the deathly silence which consumed them.

"Holding 3000 kilometres, aye sir." The Astrogation Officer confirmed.

"That's one hell of a view." Ferenczy whispered from her console. "Even if we were allowed to talk about this, no-one back home would believe it."

"You've got that right." Lieutenant Hamm said "The image series we're taking for Section One are incredible. The inner surface of the ring has a varied and diverse topography, mountain regions, jungle climates, vast savannahs. This place is amazing. The Forerunners, or whoever the hell built this thing, they were so far beyond us, we must have been like ants, and yet they just up and disappeared."

Marden nodded in agreement "The bigger they are, the harder they fall. Now can we focus on those atmospheric scans, I want a full spectroscopic analysis before we-"

"Sir! Sangheili Fleet breaking ranks and moving on our position!" Domokos blurted out.

"He's right sir, a large proportion of the fleet are moving on us, count 70 ships, 1 CSO-class Supercarrier, 6 CAS-class Assault Carriers, 10 CCS-class Battlecruisers, and the rest is destroyers, frigates and corvettes. Orders sir?" Hamm asked, looking terrified.

He gulped. If this fleet detected them, well, Prowlers weren't even supposed to take on single-seat fighter craft, let alone the kind of power these ships packed. His only option was stealth. "Nothing, cut all power to the engines, maximise Baffler input, check and re-check our active camouflage. Turn off all power systems except from core ops and life support." He looked around at his bridge crew, who were all too pre-occupied with staring at either the Halo or the approaching fleet. "That means now people!"

They sprang into life, and the lights on the bridge dimmed, and many of the secondary computer stations on the bridge flickered off. They were now running dark, and aside from one of the Covenant ships bumping into the cloaked and baffled _Midnight_, there was no chance that any of the dozens of superior vessels could detect them.

There they waited in the darkness for the next 30 minutes while the covenant ships stalked closer in the blackness, looking like a group of sharks closing in on an injured seal. The tension was palpable, and he had to really focus on his breathing to keep it steady. He breathed a shuddering sigh of relief when the congregation of sleek vessels moved past them. Instead the ships moved over to the Halo and adopted a rather odd pattern; each ship, no matter how big or small, took up a position within the ring, staying about a thousand kilometres above a certain sector of the inner surface of the Halo.

"What are they doing?" Ferenczy wondered aloud

"I'm not sure" Marden muttered "Hamm, bring up a full EM spectroscopic analysis of the fleet, passive scanners only."

"Aye sir." A grid of varying colours overlaid itself on the main view screen, and he commanded the system to zoom in on the nearest CAS-class Assault Carrier. The selected craft, magnified on the view screen, looked just as deadly this far away as it did when burning the surfaces of worlds. As the ship's passive scanners observed the ship, pinpricks of bright yellow light were placed over the lower hull, one at the prow and one aft, as well as dozens of tiny points along the side of the craft.

He pounded his fist into the arm of his chair, swearing loudly. "They're arming weapons."

"Shouldn't we evade?" Domokos asked wide-eyed.

He shook his head "This doesn't make sense, we're running dark, no way could they detect us…" Marden re-checked all the Baffler inputs, and confirmed that no radio transmissions had left the ship in the last hour. He trusted his bridge crew, but there was a story circulating around the Prowler Corps of an experimental stealth frigate, which was disabled by Insurrectionist fire after one of its crew betrayed them by transmitting a laser pulse to the rebel positions. "Start a detailed scan of the Assault Carrier, focus on the gamma region of the spectrum."

Before the Lieutenant could respond, the space around the carrier rippled and flared bright white. Two brilliant white lances of pure energy leapt towards the surface of the Halo, the tall mountains casting long stark shadows along the ring's surface as the target area burned. Following the devastating blast of the two energy projectors, a hail of blazing blue plasma torpedoes rained down on the ring, lighting the atmosphere and scorching the ground.

"Good God." Hamm whispered, horrified. "They're destroying the entire inner ring."

Marden panned out from the carrier to observe the whole situation; Hamm was right, every capital ship was doing the same thing, blasting the surface beneath them with their advanced weaponry, leaving blackened trails in their wake as they moved around in a strangely hypnotic pattern, each ship weaving backwards and forwards, pouring white hot death onto the Halo.

Not many people alive had witnessed a glassing. Generally when the covenant set about obliterating a human world, they did just that. Vaporising oceans, melting continents, setting the very atmosphere alight. It was a truly awesome sight, both magnificent and at the same time utterly horrifying.

"Why?" Ferenczy whispered.

"Ultimate Quarantine. The Flood is on that Ring. They're cauterising the infection." Marden spat, rubbing his forehead. He'd read the after-action reports, the gruesome power of the virile infection could not be allowed to leave the ring or High Charity. Knowing this, part of him was relieved that the Elites had made the decision that would have taken the UNSC months of committees and red tape to make. However, part of his mission was now being slowly vaporised by genocidal aliens, so his relief was matched equally by disappointment. "Keep recording as much as we can, I want all of this captured on tape, Section One will have a field day."

"Yeah, or a Wake." Domokos muttered

He grunted agreement before turning his attention to the readouts on his screen; at this rate, the computer estimated that the entire ring's inner surface would be destroyed within 30 hours.

"Bleed some power into the engines, give us 10% and get us to a better observational position." He ordered bitterly. "If these hinge-heads are going to destroy one of the most important scientific finds in human history, but we're going to get some real pretty pictures of them doing so."

Once they had reached their position, he ordered full black out, keeping only minimal systems online. "Kick your feet up and relax people, looks like the Sangheili are too busy to notice us. Keep an eye on them, and listen out for our Spartan friend. Seeing as the other half of our mission is currently going up in smoke, I'd like it if this one didn't."

**CPO Jacob-209, 15****th**** November 2552, Holy City of High Charity**

"That door isn't going to hold out forever." Hera reminded him for the third time in as little minutes.

"I'm fully aware of that thank you" The AI's nervousness was not helpful at this particular juncture, with his arms buried deep within the exposed wires and pipes of the Pelican's busted engine. In one hand he clutched the plasma welder and his other hand was scrabbling inside the maze of tubes connected to the thruster housing, searching for the damaged coolant pipe that had caused their crash.

The reason for the rush was a crowd of Flood, a dozen Combat Forms and a pair of the hulking Juggernaut variants were all bashing their way through the security doors to the hangar. According to the security camera footage, more were on the way from the canteen, which had now become a Flood Nest. Jacob could hear their screams and roars through the triple-thickness Titanium metal, and it certainly added a note of urgency to his actions.

"Gotcha" He muttered under his breath as he felt an irregular connection and forced a hole in the wire mesh, revealing the broken pipe, and the pool of blue dried coolant surrounding it. He quickly welded the damaged part back together, his visor automatically polarising in response to the intense light.

"Coolant flow is restored, flight capabilities restored, she'll hold for now." She confirmed, and he hurried about the task of reattaching the engine's cover plate before pulling himself inside the side door of the Pelican, tossing the welder into the crew bay and moving quickly towards the cockpit

After satisfying himself that his two patients were strapped in and stable, he took off his helmet and scratched at his itchy scalp; no matter how much money they poured into the MJOLNIR system, the basic problems of encasing a human head in a sealed helmet remained.

He rested his lid on the console as he entered the cockpit, grabbing the yoke and pulling backwards, glad that Hera had had the foresight to start the engines as he got into the ship. The readouts on the console before him read amber. Good enough. The Pelican lurched backwards towards the awaiting hangar exit, wobbling slightly as the on-board systems compensated for the slightly below optimum thrust being produced by the repaired engine.

As the proximity alarm blared in his ears the hallway door directly in front of them burst open, one half of the triple-reinforced metal glancing off of the Pelican's nose and crumpling the metal, momentarily tipping the craft forward before the thrusters automatically compensated. He swore and activated the chain gun, selecting the targets ahead of him for the 70mm auto canon to dispatch. The pack of Flood tore into the hangar, flailing limbs and screaming, one of them even clutched an Assault Rifle in one disfigured hand, loosing bursts of fire at him.

The steady pounding of the chin gun started up, and depleted uranium slugs tore the leading Juggernaut Form to ribbons before moving on to the next one. However, the ruthless efficiency of the chain gun couldn't quite stop a Combat form from leaping an incredibly long distance to land on the cockpit's viewscreen and begin pounding with its disfigured limbs against the plexiglass. The clear screen moaned and creaked under the abuse, and he knew that if the screen so much as got a crack, flood spores could enter the cabin and potentially infect his comrades.

Determined to prevent this, he jerked the yoke back hard as the rear of the dropship approached the open hangar bay door. The Pelican began a steep backwards dive, and the extra pulse of thrust to the fore engines he ordered with a flick of his thumb tipped the nose backwards, and the lip of the hangar bay entrance scraped along the dorsal surfaces of the ship, tearing the combat form from the cockpit glass.

He grinned slightly as the combat form shrieked and the Pelican continued its dive nose-first and enjoyed the feeling of freefall, slightly disappointed when he eventually pulled the pelican out of its dive and levelled out, engaging autopilot and setting the destination as the High Council Chambers before leaning back and exhaling heavily, adrenaline wearing off slowly.

"You'll be happy to know that your little stunt has not compromised the hull integrity, although you did scratch the paint a fair bit." Hera said, and he snorted.

"Noted." He said, rubbing his eyes and moaning slightly.

"Something I can help with?" Hera intoned in his mind, and he shook his head slowly in response.

"No, thank you. I'm just trying to figure out how the hell I'm supposed to drag these two out of here alive." He tapped his fingers rhythmically against the thigh of his armour, deep in thought.

"Well, if it's any help, you're in pretty good shape to keep them alive so far, they've both got vacuum-proof suits and neither of them are infected yet." She soothed "And you've established contact with Cortana, although I'm still not sure what to make of the situation myself."

He grunted "Don't humour me, if you 4th Gen AI are half as smart as the last gen, you'll have thought of every single possible course of action, its corresponding consequences, and then run each one through a dozen morality and ethics subroutines and algorithms, as well as cross-checking them with the mission parameters, worked out how long each option would take and their survivability indexes." He looked up at the diminutive holographic figure, never more aware that in reality the essence of what the AI was was spread around him in the systems of the dropship.

"You really do know something about us then." She whispered, her eyes wide and a note of respect creeping into her tone "If you want me to be straight with you, none of our 17 options is particularly appetising, the path most in line with our mission parameters is to simply overload the reactor of this station and destroy Cortana, the flood, Delta Halo and the majority of the Sangheili fleet in one fell swoop." She shook her head slightly, throwing up diagrams and schematics onto the view screen which he didn't pay much attention to.

"Well that's not going to happen, our mission has changed." He said "You and I both know that."

"Agreed, this 'message' must at least be investigated further, although I shudder to think what awful creatures have developed at the heart of the flood infestation" She continued.

"I guess we'll find out." He relented, standing up, jamming his helmet back down over his ears and moving through to the crew bay. "I'm going to need an extra gun though"

He grabbed the medical kit from its mounting as he walked over to Turney's unconscious form, removing the sedative-reversal StimPatch from the box and slapping it onto her neck. He turned away and checked that the Pilot's vitals were stable, and furrowed his brow at her slightly elevated body temperature. Her core temperature was climbing far too rapidly, especially seeing as she had not 30 minutes earlier been in cryo stasis. He made sure she was strapped in securely and returned to the Marine's side as she started coming round, groggily shaking her head and moaning.

"Where am I?" She asked, her voice croaky and hoarse.

"You're on board the Pelican, how are you feeling?" Hera said, her avatar shimmering into life behind him, he busied himself releasing her from the webbing and dragging over the set of ODST armour from its resting place.

"Jesus" She squeaked, jumping slightly at the AI's appearance. "Who the hell are you?"

"I am Hera, I'm attached to Spartan-209 for the duration of this assignment." She replied coolly, bowing slightly.

"Great, I get two machines looking after me" Turney said, sitting up and stretching, wincing. She looked up at Jacob, and the instant of awe on her face was quickly replaced by a forced indifference that the Spartan had seen on many Marine, Army and Navy faces before. "So, what's the plan?"

He coughed, clearing his throat. "There's no way around it, we have to get into the High Council chambers, at the heart of the Flood infection."

Her face paled for a moment, and she breathed deeply, eyes slightly de-focused "Okay, I'd like to think that there was another option, but there really isn't, is there?"

"Not really, no." Hera chimed in "We've taken the liberty of acquiring some better armour for you, one with good enough filters to prevent Flood Spores from entering your lungs."

"You're not selling me on this" Turney said, holding up the chest piece of the ODST suit "It's like a skin-tight coffin." She looked up at the Spartan, gulping. "Besides, if a Spartan needs my help, I know that whatever we're going to be facing is a hell of a lot scarier than you're letting on."

He grunted noncommittally. "I could probably do it solo, but I'd appreciate your eyes, ears and bullets. You know way more about the Flood than I do, how they move, how they attack." He hoped that the subtle flattery would appeal to the Marine's ego, and sure enough her eyes started sparkling a little, her frown creeping into a muted smile.

"Well, when you put it that way." She shook her head disbelievingly. "I can't believe I'm doing this, but okay, let me suit up, let it never be said that a Marine ever ran from a fight."

He nodded, and Hera's form glimmered with motes of light. "Good" She said, vanishing from view, but keeping her voice 'in' the crew bay. "I'll start a reconnaissance pattern as soon as we reach the chambers, hopefully we can get an idea of what's in there."

"Thank you Hera." He said. "Corporal, can you keep an eye on her while you're suiting up? We pulled her out of one of the _In Amber Clad_'s cryo pods, and she's spiking a fever."

"Yes sir" she responded, slipping back into relatively formal military procedure. With these specialist ops, there was never really a chain of command to follow, and a lot of the decisions pertinent to the mission had to be made on the fly. Turney had done what he had hoped she would, returned to being the Marine she was, following his orders like they were her own CO's. It would not only help expedite the mission, but also stave off any PTSD symptoms for the time being.

He walked back into the cockpit, the flight HUD for the Pelican automatically layering itself onto his visor as he entered. He sat down and waited for Hera to appear; he'd felt her urge to talk with him in his own head, a feeling he could never quite get used to. She did just that, hands clasped behind her in a rather formal manner.

"What's up?" He asked

"The Corporal" She said hesitantly "Do you really think she is capable of keeping herself together? You've already had to sedate her once, and taking her into a potential kill zone filled with the very things which could induce more problems? Have you ever heard of playing with fire, Spartan?"

"You're right." He admitted, causing a stunned look of shock to flash across her simulated features. "On paper this is a very bad idea, but my human intuition tells me she's good. I wouldn't be doing this if I didn't believe in her."

A few moments of silence passed between them, and Jacob felt the tense knot of worry in her mind ease itself in the back of his own head, being replaced by a cool sense of calm and certainty. It was nice to _feel_ the AI's confidence in him, more reassuring than a thousand people _saying_ the same. In a way, he had a better relationship with the_ Artificial _Intelligence than with most others.

"I trust your judgement" Hera said matter-of-factly, and the dropship tilted slightly as it entered its holding pattern "Beginning scans, you might want to get the cache of weapons that you requisitioned from the frigate, initial survey already indicates a concentrated Flood presence."

"Thank you Hera" He acknowledged, getting up and walking back into the crew bay, smirking inside his helmet at Turney's comic efforts to squeeze into the unfamiliar ODST armour and striding over to the pile of weapons and ammunition, quickly tallying the haul. It amounted to one M41 Rocket launcher with two rockets in the tubes and two spare, a thousand rounds of Assault rifle ammunition, and half a dozen M9 frag grenades. Hardly the tools needed to storm a heavily defended Flood Hive. Had he found a Scorpion MBT lying around the _In Amber Clad_'s hangar bay, their odds might be near certain, but that was not the case, and even his optimistic mind set couldn't give them a chance of success above 30%.

Nevertheless, he had a job to do, so he cracked his neck, calmed himself and began stowing as much ammo possible in his armour's compartments and attachment points. He picked up the crate of magazines and hauled it over to Turney, who was struggling with the last piece of the armour, the helmet. Unlike Marine BDU helmets, ODST variants were fully encompassing, incorporating a full-face visor and vacuum sealed neck.

"Hold still" He said, and she did so, allowing him to fasten the seal around the neck with a hissing noise. At the same time, an icon popped up on his HUD, showing the Battle Armour's diagnostics, health monitors and vacuum rating. Hera automatically connected, changing the bright green icon a warm orange and activating the helmet's filters, protecting the Corporal from Flood Spores, which were likely to be at their highest concentration in the High Council Chambers.

"You ready?" He asked the Marine, and her visor depolarised to reveal a stoic look of defiance etched across her pretty features.

"Ready as I'll ever be." She said, picking up her MA5 and slapping a fresh magazine into the stock, clipping multiple more to the ODST armour's hard points.

"Good, stick with me, keep your eyes and ears open, call out your targets and keep low." He instructed, turning and attaching the M41 to his back, stowing the two spare rounds in the ODST armour's backpack.

"Got it, let's get this over with." She muttered, priming her weapon.

"Hera, take us down to the nearest safe LZ, we'll high-tail it to the High Council while you finish the more detailed scans" He said, facing the rear ramp of the dropship, grabbing one of the support rails as the craft went into a steep dive.

"Nearest I can get you is about a kilometre away, there's no space big enough any closer that isn't covered in Flood, and this one's showing some abnormal spectroscopic events anyway, be cautious." Her voice came through his helmet speakers, and he saw Turney jump slightly at the disembodied voice speaking directly into their ears.

He didn't respond, focussing on the change in pitch, yaw and roll of the floor beneath his feet, feeling the dropship level out and bleed speed, pulling up slightly to slow down and then quickly drop to the Landing Zone beneath them. The ramp whirred into life, revealing an empty landing pad surrounded by low structures.

The pad itself was raised above the floor by about 4 metres, and the stairway down was directly ahead of them, every surface was alien, purple and blue coloured alloys dominated both the design of the landing pad itself and those of the buildings around, every tower or structure looked curved, organic, and insect-like to a certain degree. There was faint light projected by the artificial star at High Charity's peak, and the bluey-silver glow glimmered glossily off of every surface, making the surrounding seem even more alien.

As soon as the ramp touched down, he jumped out of the Pelican, rifle raised, scanning for threats. The Corporal followed suit, and when they both found no obvious hostiles, they threw up a green status icon on their individual HUDs. Hera acknowledged the icon with one of her own, then maxed out the thrusters of the dropship, sending it shooting directly upwards out of view like a bat out of hell.

"Comm check" He said, sweeping his gaze across the area.

"Check" Turney said, and he led her across the landing platform the hair on the back of his neck standing on end in conjunction with the uneasy dread in the pit of his stomach. Something wasn't right, but he couldn't figure out exactly what it was.

It was only halfway down the short flight of stairs that he realised; during normal operations, each building in High Charity had an exhaust port on the roof from the building's power transformers. This was to help distribute the massive power capabilities of the Forerunner Dreadnought ship powering the city. He'd seen the shimmering on rooftops and assumed that they were due to the transformers, but it was the massive Dreadnought-sized gap in the city's skyline which had made the penny drop; there was only emergency power, which should mean that there was no power grid, no transformers working and therefore no shimmer.

"Corporal, keep walking with me, but get ready for a fight." He said calmly, turning the safety of his weapon off and beginning to walk across the courtyard below the LZ. He spotted a half dozen shimmering silhouettes shadowing them, three of them on nearby rooftops, two behind them on the ground and one to their left. The tell-tale rippling of the air, coupled with an above-background energy signature, told him that they were being followed by a group of Elites, or at least forces loyal to the Swords of Sangheilios. Brutes had never been fond of camouflage, and when they did use it, they almost always deployed radar jammers to compensate for their inferior cloaking units.

"Shit. I see them." She swore. "Why the hell aren't they attacking?"

"Technically we have a truce with the elites, we're not to fire on them unless they fire first."

"Holy crap, you could've told me." She muttered "Never thought I'd see the day when the fighting would stop."

"Just keep walking, if they get too close, I'll deploy flashbangs and cover you, you dive into the nearest cover and put them down, copy?"

"Copy." She said, sounding equal parts terrified and determined.

And so they marched onwards, tailed by invisible aliens, through the dark, deserted streets. He noted the similarities with human urban architecture, the sidewalks and stores, juxtaposed by the altogether foreign shapes of the many vehicles littered along roadways, all abandoned by their owners. Most of them had open canopies, and again he could draw comparisons with the size and use of human vehicles, smaller vehicles could easily be the equivalent of hatchbacks, larger, longer transport vessels analogous of trucks. He even spotted a few military variants, a couple of Ghosts, a deserted Spectre, all long since run out of fuel.

They rounded a corner heading towards their objective, and he immediately stopped, swearing; about 20 metres away a wall of Flood Forms waited for them, Combat forms, bloated bodies of Carriers, and even a Juggernaut form at the back. Interspersed between them was a carpet of the small turnip-like Infection forms, hundreds of them.

The pack of Flood spotted them, and a cacophony of screams ripped through the still air. He quickly pulled the pin on a grenade and tossed it toward the group, following up with a barrage of rifle fire. Turney was slower to respond, and her actions seemed sluggish to him as she raised her own rifle and targeted the leading Combat form, ripping it to shreds.

They both backed away from the enemies quickly, firing as they went, and he dragged her behind the corner of the building as the frag grenade detonated, decimating their numbers and spreading chunks of flesh and a mist of bodily fluids over the area.

"Run!" He yelled, and they sprinted away from their pursuers, back down the street they'd come down. He had to force himself to slow down to stick with the Marine, who was no slow coach, but was nowhere near as quick as the augmented Spartan. He turned his head and his heart sank; anther 20 or so Flood had joined in the chase, bellowing tortured screams at them as they ran.

"Keep going" He instructed her as he swung around, crouched and emptied his magazine into the mass of disfigured bodies, dropping a few, but not nearly enough. As they closed in on him, he took off at his top speed, easily catching up with the Corporal within 15 seconds.

The wave behind them now numbered in the hundreds; more and more of the creatures appeared from side-streets, buildings and alleys. Jacob as now convinced that the Flood worked on a Hive-mind basis, all the Flood in the area had reacted to their presence too quickly for there not to be some common intelligence.

"There's… Too… Many.. Of… Them" Turney gasped, looking around at the plethora of parasitic life-forms. "You can outrun them, leave me to keep them busy."

"Not happening." He stated, tossing another frag grenade behind them as they turned a corner onto a side street flanked by low residential buildings. He hailed the dropship "Hera, we need CAS now, get over here!"

He got back nothing but static interrupted by a series of rhythmic pulses of slightly lower white noise. They were being jammed. He swore, throwing yet another grenade towards the corner around which in a few seconds an army of Flood would surge, unstopping, unrelenting, unfeeling.

"You've got to leave me, give me the M41, I can hold them off for a couple of minutes!" Turney shouted, panting.

"I'm not leaving you." He growled, frustrated. He looked around for something he could use, and spotted the low silhouette of a Wraith tank further down the road. "There!"

They sprinted over to the vehicle, still and powerless. He climbed onto the front, forcing the driver's hatch open. "Get in."

"There's no power" Turney said, head cocked to one side.

"Just get in." He ordered, and she climbed up the side of the tank and slid inside. "Wait, you're not-"

He cut her off by ripping off her backpack and ramming the hatch closed again, bending the lip of the hatch along with the metal of the cover itself to prevent it from being opened. He cut off her Comms channel from his helmet and ignored the frantic beating on the portal and jumped off the Wraith to face the horde. If nothing else, he could at least lead the Flood away, which itself would be easier without the Corporal, and then circle back to get her once he'd lost them.

That plan went very well until the Flood circled around behind him. He'd drastically underestimated their intelligence and tactics, and it was with dread and anger that he saw the second wall of enemies round the corner behind him. He steeled himself for death, adopted a stable firing position, readied the M41 Rocket launcher and fired.

The 140mm HEAT rocket flew towards the enemy, striking a leading combat form and detonating, vaporising all Flood forms within a 4 metre radius, and dismembering many of those outside that radius. Before he had a chance to fully inspect the damage, he span on the spot to fire the second rocket at the opposite army, having a similar effect on their numbers.

He never finished reloading the launcher. As he slammed the fresh rockets into place, a wave of heat blew past him a millisecond before a shockwave almost blew him off his feet from behind; a column of blue-tinged smoke rose from a smoking crater in the road surface 150 metres away, and a blue fireball rolled across the advancing Flood, turning them to ash. Through the heat haze and billowing smoke, Jake could just about distinguish the hull of another Wraith tank, this one fully functional and armed, demonstrated when it let loose another devastating plasma mortar, this one targeting the other crowd of Flood.

But no matter how effective the tank could be, there were still too many Flood closing in on him, too close to him to risk a mortar round, unless these Covenant were not allied with the Swords, in which case what he thought of it didn't really matter, as he was likely to be vaporised shortly anyway.

He dropped the rocket launcher and picked up his MA5, firing into the approaching group of about 15 Combat Forms, dropping a couple quickly before the bolt clacked as the magazine ran dry. He again used his rifle as a club to knock down the leading Combat form before stamping once on its chest with a heavy bot, killing it instantly as the Infection form within was crushed.

He turned to face the next approaching enemy, whipping out his combat knife to find that it had been bisected down the middle by the searing glow of an Energy Sword wielded by the largest Elite he had ever seen. They locked eyes for a second, then each engaged the nearest Flood, the Elite swinging his Sword around in swift strikes, often cutting his foes clean in half, while he took on a more subtle approach, preferring to use the Flood's own momentum against them, then plunging the combat knife into their chests when they were down or off balance.

Out of the corner of his eye he saw more Elites de-cloak and join in the fray, firing bolts of superheated plasma into the centre of mass of the various Flood. He could tell by their sharpshooter aim that these were not standard military units, that and their distinctive full-body armour suits.

Under such combined fire, the Flood stood no chance. Those that were not obliterated by the sheer firepower of the Wraith were downed by pinpoint accurate plasma fire or detonated in a purple haze as the super-combined needle rifle rounds activated, ripping their bodies to ribbons. Jacob put the final Combat form down with a jackhammer punch, then stood to face the leader of the Elites, covered in putrid flesh and fluids.

"Come with me Demon, we have much to discuss, and even more to accomplish together." The leader growled in heavily muffled English, his twin Energy Swords' blades vanishing.

"Lead the way" Jake said cautiously, pointing back at the Wraith that the Corporal was stuck inside. "You got a key for one of these things?"


	5. Chapter 5

**Commander Marden, UNSC **_**Midnight**_**, Coelest system**

In a strange and utterly horrifying way, he found the view before him to be spectacularly beautiful. The oddly shaped curved hulls of the Sangheili warships reminded him of insects, scuttling about underneath rocks. But there were no rocks, and the only thing these insectoid shapes "scuttled" over was the inner surface of the immense Halo installation in orbit around the gas giant substance. The ring itself was fascinating, the outer planes a dark metallic grey and etched with regular markings, some circular and glowing against the blackness of space, others filled in the outer surface with mosaic-like inscriptions, parallel grooves, concentric triangles, all regularly laid out in a rather pleasing design. Whoever the Forerunners were, they must have had an appreciation of beauty, because while he knew that the installation before him was nothing more than a galactic superweapon, he couldn't help but marvel at the artistic flairs and motifs present. The inner surface of this object was even more astonishing, it looked like someone had taken a sliver of topography right off of a human colony world; Harvest, Reach, Haven, and had wrapped it around the inside of a giant hula hoop. Deep greens, blues, browns and startling whites shone from inside the ring, portraying vast mountain ranges, deep oceans, and desert tundra. A perfect ecosystem.

And now half of it was burning.

He understood why the Elites had done it, decided to cauterise the infection that was the Flood, a parasitic creature which virulently and abhorrently took over any life with sufficient biomass, turning a human into one of them in mere seconds. Once turned, the Flood had one goal; complete consummation of all sentient life.

So, given the threat they all faced, Marden was secretly relieved that the Sangheili High Command had done what they had done, had positioned their ships in a regular formation around infected areas of the ring's inner surface and had turned their plasma weaponry and advanced energy projectors downwards, burning the surface of the halo until nothing of the abomination would remain.

His musings were brought to a swift end as the bridge bulkhead slid open.

"How's the light show Commander?" Ferenczy asked as she floated onto the bridge and strapped herself into her station.

"Certainly beats New Year's in New Times Square." He mumbled, not looking up at the Engineering officer as she drifted past him, his eyes glued to the data pad before him; before cycling off duty for his scheduled sleep, Lieutenant Hamm had set up an automatic communications monitoring system directed towards the Sangheili fleet raining fire down upon the colossal Halo installation 3000 kilometres away.

"Bafflers are fully functional, active camouflage is holding." The Engineering officer said "Do you think they know we're here?"

He sighed. "Nothing in their communications indicates such, I think they're all too busy destroying the single most incredible xeno-archaeological find in all of human history."

She shook her head slowly, before turning around in her seat to face him, frowning quizzically. "I didn't know you had an interest in that field sir?"

He shrugged and rubbed his eyes; he'd neglected to catch up on sleep in the last several hours since the Sangheili operation started, and it was beginning to weigh on him. "I minored in xeno-archaeology before I signed up to the Corps, always thought I'd try and get back into it if the war ever ended."

"I could see you teaching" She smiled "I've got you as the type that no one would dare hand their work in late to."

He snorted "Not that it matters much. With all the ONI secrets in my head, Brass would never let me anywhere else than at the helm of a ship or…" He trailed off as a new translation from Sangheili communications 30 minutes ago rolled across his screen. The system had tagged them as low priority, hence the wait, but certain details within the message had caught his eye. The transmission was a broadcast from a CCS-class Battlecruiser, the _Penitence;_

**My brothers, we must not fall to these heretical ways, we have followed in the example of Zansa 'Dural. Rise up against the forsaken, and we shall tread the blessed path with our Jiralhanae brethren. **

He snapped to action, activating the ship-wide battle stations alert and fastening his harness more securely. "Bleed power into the engines, get us 10000 km distant, this system is about to get a whole lot more crowded."

"Aye sir, making 10000 distant." She said, startled by his sudden order, but confident that there was a good reason behind the seemingly unprecedented actions.

He felt the hull around him vibrate smoothly as the prowler swooped around and slunk away from the ring, and he used the time it took for the rest of the bridge crew to float into their stations in various states of disarray and disrobe to double check his hunch. More transmissions between ships attempted to track down the exact origin of the earlier signal and punish whoever had sent it.

As the last of his crew took their seats, he cleared his throat and addressed them. "There is dissent among the Sangheili fleet as to the destruction of the Halo. After several thousand years of religious fervour surrounding these installations, it is not surprising that the thought of glassing one would cause some discontent. We've monitored signals from within the fleet indicating that a party or parties has reached out to what is left of the Jiralhanae fleet to help protect the ring and destroy the Elites."

He gave them a moment to absorb that information, then continued "I don't want to go rushing in there if things get ugly, so to start with we're going dark further out to observe until we have a clear tactical picture, understood?"

He was greeted by a chorus of "Yes sir"s and the bridge fell into near silence, the only noise the humming of computer stations and the sounds of a half dozen people nervously contemplating the knife edge upon which the whole crew's fates rested on.

The minutes trickled by, and Marden busied himself by checking and re-checking the ship's cloaking systems and weapons. If the worst came to the worst, the prowler was stocked with enough HORNET nuclear mines to destroy a small fleet. He was typing up a quick status report when the first cruiser slipped in to view amid a dazzling aura of white energy.

"Sir, new contact, CCS-class battlecruiser, holding just outside the Sangheilis' range."

"They're initiating communications with the Sangheili, CAS _Shadow of Intent."_

"Show it on the main screen" He ordered, and the ugly maw of a Jiralhanae-or Brute as the UNSC had dubbed them- flickered onto screen alongside the split-jawed face of Rtas 'Vadum, the Elites de-facto commander. He wasn't sure if Sangheili could look ugly, but this one was, one of his four jaws was missing, an ugly scar ran along one side of his face and his beady little eyes glowed with malice as he addressed the Brute captain.

"Jirau'l" 'Vadum snarled, his face contorted with quiet fury "You would dare show your hide here?"

"I would if only to see the depths of your heresy. The last of your kind to be involved in the destruction of one of the Sacred Rings did not live to see the day of the Great Journey." The Brute growled back.

"The Arbiter?" 'Vadum contorted his jaws slightly in what Marden could only assume was the Sangheili equivalent of a smile "Poor traitorous Jirau'l, Tartarus is dead, slain by the Arbiter on the surface."

The Brute looked visibly shocked "Impossible"

"Is it?" 'Vadum hissed, evidently enjoying the Jiralhanae's discomfort "Now, before we burn you from this galaxy, you have one chance to surrender yourselves to us, or we will annihilate you."

"May the gods smite you down, filthy reptile" The brute growled before terminating the link.

"Sir, Sangheili Fleet is moving to intercept, two CCS, three CRS, lateral lines heating up." Hamm informed him.

On his magnified view, the five capital ships broke away from the rest of the fleet and pursued the Brute ship, which quickly turned away from the Halo and accelerated away towards the Gas giant around which they all orbited.

"What are they playing at" He wondered to himself, highlighting the Brute cruiser and observing that it was only accelerating half as much as a ship of that class was capable of. The Elites closed in on the struggling ship, their lateral surfaces visible glowing as their plasma batteries prepared to fire. The five pursuant craft spread out into an attack formation, trying to maximise the damage dealt to the lone target.

"They're out of range of the rest of the Fleet" He muttered again to himself, a dawning realisation spreading through his mind.

"Prepare for more contacts" he barked, and no sooner had he said so than a few dozen more gleaming halos of light winked into existence surrounding the Elite vessels. Easily a hundred Covenant ships slipped into view, in perfect position to destroy the outnumbered ships.

"Mother of God" Hamm whispered. There was a moment of pure silence, a moment of such dreadful stillness that Marden forgot to breathe, and then damnation was unleashed. A Dozen energy projectors erupted from surrounding Brute ships, accompanied by a flurry of bright blue plasma torpedoes. The energy beams impacted with the Elite hulls, bursting energy shields and blistering hulls, peeling layers of composite away like they were nothing. The whole scene was lit up with such deadly light. The plasma trailed behind the energy projectors, detonating against the already scorched hulls, gutting the Elite ships. Fragments of debris span off into space, and what was left of the Elite attack span adrift, all power lost, ripped apart by the ferocity of the attack. Not a single retaliatory shot was fired. One cruiser, billowing bright blue flame, its hull a twisted and contorted lump of burned metal, accelerated at full speed into the midst of the nearest pack of brute ships, and suddenly the cluster of ships was lost in an amazing, brilliant white bloom as the cruiser's fusion drives detonated, shattering hulls and sending a half dozen brute ships spinning out of control, venting atmosphere, failing engines struggling to bring them under control.

From their viewpoint, each covenant ship looked like a child's toy, the purple/blue of the hulls seemingly too iridescent, the scale of the destruction too much. It looked surreal, and yet the coordinated way in which the Brute fleet turned to face the Elites glassing the ring was in no way trivial. Close to a hundred menacing hulls turned to bear down upon the disjointed battlegroup.

"Sir, the Sangheili Fleet is breaking off from the Halo and is moving to engage the enemy ships." Hamm said, and he saw a wave of purple metal rise from the ring and dart towards the awaiting wall of ships.

"What are they doing, this is suicide!" Ferenczy wondered aloud, her eyes glued to the main viewscreen.

"Sir! Slip space rupture initiated!"

As one, the Sangheili ships disappeared into glimmering blue/white aura of energy, reappearing directly behind the brute fleet almost before they had disappeared. But, instead of turning to stab the collective back of the group of ships, they fled, away from the brutes, away from the ring and back towards High Charity.

"An in-system Slip-space jump" Domokos said wistfully. "If only we could get our hands on that"

"Sir, the Sangheili fleet is breaking away from quarantine positions around High Charity."

"Incoming transmission from Sierra-209, sir."

"Send it to my console" He ordered, keeping his eyes fixed on the fleets ahead of him. The Sangheili fleet now numbered at least a hundred and twenty strong, facing off against a slightly smaller fleet of Jiralhanae.

The two armadas unleashed their waves of single-seat craft, and the space between them glittered and sparked with spurts of plasma fire and pinprick explosions of downed fighters. As the dogfight raged on, the capital ships charged one another, the larger vessels hanging back and using their multiple Energy Projectors as sniping weapons against the smaller enemy capital ships, while the cruisers, destroyers and frigates engaged in bloody combat, laser point defences blasted stray fighters, plasma torpedoes shimmered as they were ejected from their batteries and crashed against shields and hulls, beams of dozens of glassing weapons sprung up for milliseconds at a time, piercing hulls and detonating reactors. It was chaos.

Marden tore his eyes away from the view screen to check the prowler's sensors to get a sense for who was winning the intense skirmish. The Elites were giving as good as they got, but they had been caught unprepared by the brute tactics, half their ships didn't even have full shield strength before the fighting began, and so they were losing. A full half of the blue dots denoting Elite vessels winked off the display as they were destroyed, along with half that many red Brute dots.

He made a decision right then, one which would trouble him for years to come. He decided that as the lesser of the two evils, he had to help the Sangheili to even the odds against the Brutes. Even if the truce between Elites and Humans was temporary and tenuous, he would stick by it, and Brute ships which survived this combat were vastly more likely to be a direct threat to earth and the colonies than the Elite hulls.

"Sir, more slip-space ruptures"

The remainder of the Elite Fleet, now dwindled to around 50 ships, warped from existence from the centre of the fray and rematerialized 20,000 kilometres away, heading around the gas giant Substance to gain some cover from the intense punishment.

"Open a line to the _Shadow of Intent"_ he ordered.

"Yes sir."

A waveform flickered into life on-screen, dancing with activity as the carrier answered the call. Even before the Shipmaster had spoken, he could tell from the screaming in the background, coupled with multiple distorted alarms, that the Elites were in trouble.

"Humans! What do you want?"Rtas 'Vadum demanded, his growling tones menacing even through digital translation software.

"Shipmaster, I'm here to offer the UNSCs help in your fight." Marden spoke softly, ignoring the incredulous glances he was receiving form his officers. "And from what I'm seeing, you need it."

"And what possible help could a Human vessel be to me?"

"A great deal of help, if we play this correctly." He said "So, Shipmaster, if you do exactly as I say within the next 30 minutes, I think we have a good chance of wiping these Brutes off the face of the galaxy." He coughed nervously "What do you say?"

**Chief Petty Officer Jacob-209, High Charity, Coelest system**

Jacob was starting to hate this mission. He could handle Covenant. He'd spent the best part of 30 years slicing his way through every species and sub-species, knew their weaknesses and strengths, which nerve clusters to hit, which areas to aim for in each. He could handle Humans. The whole purpose of the Spartan project was to quell human rebellion. But the Flood? They were a whole different ballpark.

"I can't believe you did that." Turney grumbled from beside him, breaking the icy silence she had been treating him with for the last 20 minutes.

He didn't look down at her, opting to stare at the back of the Sangheili leader's helmeted head. "If I hadn't, you would've died."

"Bullshit." She snapped "I could've helped."

"Your survival is a tier two mission directive, I took the necessary actions to prevent significant…"

"Drop the robot soldier crap" She interrupted "You either treat me like a mission objective, or you treat me as a Marine, either I help, or you stick me in the dropship until this is all over."

He shook his head slightly, genuinely unsure on how to respond, and continued trying to contact the dropship with the smart AI Hera onboard.

"Fieldmaster" he began, using his knowledge of Sangheilli combat armour to guess at the alien's rank "Where are we going exactly?"

The loping creature did not turn his head as he responded "Our command centre is not far, we have your ship there, and it is where we will plan our next act."

They walked on for another 10 minutes, and he made sure to record everything he could of the streets of High Charity, while carefully keeping an eye on the half dozen SpecOps Sangheili walking in formation with them. They passed through a gated wall and into a small courtyard packed with more Elites, piles of alien weaponry and ammunition, a row of armoured vehicles, from the large Wraith mortar tank to a pair of ghost reconnaissance vehicles. In the centre of the square was a raised platform on which a dozen computer terminals were arranged, each with an Elite manning it, and a tactical holographic map of the station suspended above a table.

In the corner the dull green angular shape of their Pelican dropship stood out among the smooth curves of Spectres and Locusts. The Fieldmaster waved his men to disperse and turned to face the Spartan, and Jacob found himself reflexively tensing his muscles in expectation of a fight.

"Demon, ready yourself for battle and meet me on the dais, we have little time until the parasite strikes us here. We need to mobilise before that happens."

Jake nodded and walked briskly over to the Pelican, synchronising with its systems and breathing a sigh of relief as Hera's green avatar flickered into life in a corner of his HUD.

"Well, took you long enough." She smirked "They threatened to shoot me down you know, the Elites. I figured that seeing as we're supposed to be allies, I'd rather comply and let you sort it out than tick them off."

"That was wise" He muttered "Get me any and all info you have on the leader, what his objective is, his deployment history, anything."

He turned to the Marine, choosing his words carefully. "We still don't know how friendly these Elites are, I need someone on the outside to let me know if they're plotting something. You take the Pelican, be the aerial reconnaissance while we do all the dirty work."

She nodded "Hey, it's as far away from those freaks as I can get." She conceded, and he got the distinct impression that she wasn't solely referring to the Flood.

He opened the blood tray door and immediately levelled his rifle, pointing it at the blur of motion he'd glimpsed in his periphery as the door had swung open. He activated his flashlight, illuminating a petite figure in grey Marine Air Corps flight fatigues, clutching a sidearm and pointing it at his head.

He lowered his rifle quickly spread his arms to indicate that he wasn't a threat. "Staff Sergeant, Chief Petty Officer Jacob-209, I'm a friend."

"Stay away!" A French-accented voice squeaked. "You're one of them, I'm not letting you get me!"

He shook his head "I'm a Spartan, I've been sent here to rescue you. Who do you think pulled you off of the frigate?"

She brandished her gun towards the courtyard behind him, seemingly holding her left arm to her side. "Then why are those covenant bastards with you?"

"There's a truce" Turney calmly spoke, coming out from behind him, holding her hands up and holding her helmet by her side. "Do you remember me Staff? 2nd squad, Mila Company? We always used to sit by the vending machines in the mess?"

The pilot lowered her pistol slightly, staring at Turney "Corporal, I don't…" Then she collapsed, her magnum clattering on the metal floor as she slumped over. Both the Spartan and the Marine rushed over to her, propping her up in one of the seats and removing her helmet to check her vitals.

"So, when were you going to tell me about this?" Jake asked Hera once he was sure that the Staff Sergeant was in no immediate danger of death.

"I thought you had it in hand" She dismissed "I tried talking to her, but she kept babbling on about Charleston, the _In Amber Clad_'s AI and how he'd been turned by the Flood. I thought she could use a more organic touch."

He started rolling the left sleeve of her flight suit up, but quickly stopped when he saw the raw red blistering skin underneath, freezer burn, a typical sign of improper cryo-stasis preparation. She had likely passed out from the sheer pain. He attached the suit's vacuum-proof gloves and inserted the nozzle of a bio-foam canister into the port on the left bicep, emptying the container to coat the burn in sterile, antiseptic and anaesthetic foam. It should numb the pain and prevent infection until they could escape the station.

"She recognised me" Turney said as she picked up the magnum and attached it to the unconscious pilot's holster. "That's a good sign, right?"

"We'll see." He said non-committally. "When she wakes, ask her if she's good enough to fly, I need to speak to our Sangheili friend."

He walked quickly out of the back of the dropship and headed over to the command centre, around which almost all of the Elites had now gathered, seemingly awaiting orders. On his way over, he quickly glanced at the Fieldmaster's information. His name was Volor Refum, a prominent SpecOps commander who reported directly to Rtas 'Vadum.

"Oh him, you know he killed his first human when he was the equivalent of 12 years old?" Hera said in his ear "Competent warrior, excellent strategist, one of only a few Elites to wield two Energy Swords, that takes a substantial amount of skill."

"Noted." He grunted. "If Morin can fly the dropship, spin off some of your dumb processes to act as backup in the ship and transfer to my neural implant. I have a feeling I'm going to need every nanosecond you can shave off my reflexes."

"No problem, I'll quieten up now, wouldn't want to intrude on the budding romance between you and the Field Master." She disappeared from his HUD.

As he approached the edge of the crowd of Elites, they parted for him to pass, staring at him with those beady eyes, a couple of them growling as he walked. He kept his weapon down, but not quite pointed at the floor, showing that he was still ready to fight if necessary. He entered the inner circle of the crowd and came face to face with Refum, who was leaning on one side of the hologram-producing table.

"Demon." He nodded slightly at Jake before beginning his speech. "Listen, all of you. Right now the parasite has consumed much of High Charity, and continues to advance using out own weapons against us. Fleet Master Xiras is trapped in a compartment just off of the Council Chamber, which is the nest of this wretched infection." He slammed a three-fingered fist down on the table. "I will not allow this plague to take him. We need all the officers we can to fight the Brutes." This drew a chorus of hisses and low growls from the assembled warriors, some of whom started shaking their weapons in the air. "All conventional exits are blocked, but there is a huragok access tunnel here, which leads into the ventilation system of the Fleet Master's refuge." He turned to Jake "This is where you come in."

He nodded "Seeing as we're going to the Council Chambers, I need to retrieve a data unit from that location, and preferably transport it via your ship to Earth. Is the _Indulgence of Conviction_ still docked?

"Most fortuitous" Refum nodded slowly "The ship is ready to depart as soon as we have Xiras. In order to get him, there is something you must do for us. There is an energy sterilisation device in the ventilation system, if it detects solid matter passing through the airway, it emits a high energy beam to dispose of it. We cannot deactivate it, and the energy emitted is more than enough to break our energy shielding." He pointed at his armour "But from what we have learned about your armour systems, it can redirect energy reserves to specific portions of the exoskeleton, correct?"

"If that were true" Jake began, slightly alarmed at how much this Elite knew of MJOLNIR armour systems. "I would be able to pass quickly through this steriliser, redirecting energy throughout to endure that I am not damaged."

"What do you mean _you_ would be able to do it?" Hera whispered slyly in his ear "You could try, but at those speeds at least half of you would end up barbecue."

He ignored her, listening instead to the Field Master as he continued. "Excellent, then we have a plan. However, the entrance to this ventilation shaft is overrun with Flood, they have been trying to reach the Fleet master as well. While you infiltrate the system, the rest of us will be creating a diversion at the main entrance to the Chambers to draw the enemy away. We lack air support, but we shall prevail."

He cleared his throat "Actually, Fleid Master, I believe we can assist you there" He jerked his thumb over his shoulder towards the Pelican. "We can provide real time imagery as well as fire support."

He wasn't sure if Elites could smile, but Refum looked slightly less menacing for a moment "My thanks, Demon. We shall deploy in 20 cycles, have your ship communicate with our command centre and be ready for a fight."


	6. Chapter 6

**Chief Petty Officer Jacob-209, Near High Council Chambers, High Charity, **_**Coelest**_** system**

"How in the hell do I let myself get into these situations" He grumbled, carefully lowering himself onto the next perch inside the immensely long shaft. These passageways were meant for the Huragok of the Covenant engineers, floating tentacle aliens with an almost obsessive interest in improving and maintaining technology. Their technical prowess had been what kept the covenant light years ahead of the UNSC for the majority of the war. Energy shielding had only been adopted as part of the MJOLNIR armour systems in the last year, whereas the Elites had boasted the technology for hundreds of years. He found it odd that he hadn't come across a single Engineer, humanity's name for the Huragok species, alive or dead thus far.

"From what I've read in your file, this isn't even top 10 most precarious predicaments that you've escaped from" Hera chirped in the back of his mind. The AI had re-integrated with his neural lattice as soon as Morin had woken up and taken the flight stick of their dropship. It had been no easy task to convince the Pilot to refrain from blasting their Elite allies to bits. He supposed that from her point of view, she had been put into emergency cryo-sleep whilst they were still locked in a bitter war with the aliens. It must be a hard world to wake up to.

"Oh I don't know, I feel like this is way worse than New Phoenix." He said, reaching a hand down to grab at the next rung in the ladder. The rungs were awkwardly spaced, designed for Grunts and Kig-Yar, not Humans. "How long until the filters?"

"New Phoenix? That's not listed in your Service Record, was that the business with the Prime… Never mind, I've decided that I'm better off not knowing." She responded, and he could almost feel her smirk inside his own brain. He'd never get used to Ai integration. "And the plasma grating is another 35 metres further down. And beyond that it's a 400 metre drop until the bottom, so, watch your step"

He adjusted the intensity of his helmet lights, peeking down over his shoulder to stare into the inky black chasm down which he clambered. The hole was about a metre wide in diameter, barely enough to fit a fully armoured Spartan down, and he was beginning to feel a curious mix of claustrophobia and vertigo. These contrasting tides pulled at his stomach as he descended into the darkness.

"Stop here" She said, and he came to a rest staring at the wall, now dimly illuminated by a faded blue sheen. He craned his neck to peek downwards and saw his indomitable obstacle; about 3 metres below him, the ladder ended abruptly with a recessed doorway that presumably led to further access tunnels. Unfortunately for him, all doors on this level had been dead-locked, and it would take him a prohibitively long time to pry them open. His only option was further down, where the ladder continued about 2 metres below where it had stopped.

The only problem was the laser decontamination filter between him and the continuing descent. He couldn't see the beams, but tiny motes of bright blue hue winked at him from recesses in the shaft wall directly behind him, and he knew that if he were to put his hand through the invisible beams that it would be blistered and burned before he could withdraw it, even with his reaction times. He pondered for a minute the implications this had for the Covenant's stance on the health and safety of its maintenance staff, but then he reasoned that if the Elites and Prophets would send wave after wave of countless Unggoy into battle as cannon fodder, then maybe their domestic practices followed a similar vein.

"Okay, are you ready?" He asked her, tightening his grip on the rungs, beginning to bend and compress the metal beneath his gauntleted fist. What he was asking of her was no small task; in order to stave off the deadly filtration system, the AI would have to re-route power to his shields in a millimetre thin band at the same position as the laser beams, and move that band up his body as he accelerated downwards due to the station's slightly higher than Earth's gravity to ensure that he wasn't cooked alive. Ideally he would already be going at a high speed to minimise the time that his shields needed to defend against the attack, but he also needed to be going slow enough so that he could catch a rung of the ladder once he was past to prevent him from falling 400 metres to his untimely death.

"I'm ready. When you let go, put your hands by your sides and don't move them until we're clear, also, try not to hit the sides, it really throws off my calculations." She said almost absent mindedly, the only indication he had of the effort she was expending in this manoeuvre . "You don't need to give a countdown or anything, I'll know when you've let go before you do."

That last statement still fresh in his mind, he shifted his weight a bit, straightening his legs ever so slightly. And let go.

There was no flash of light, no sudden increase in temperature inside the suit as the lasers activated. He counted one second and then grabbed hold of the rung in front of him, jerking to a sudden halt almost as soon as his fall had begun. He checked his instruments; shield strength at 25%, all systems active. So they hadn't been turned into Spartan barbecue. Well, or they had and he was now in the dullest afterlife ever.

"Good work" He commended his artificial companion, continuing the repetitive monotony of climbing down the ladder as his suit bled power into his shields.

"Thank you" She said in his ears, sounding oddly out of breath. For a moment he marvelled at how the AI managed to convey so much feeling and intuition with simple tone of voice. "That was tougher than I'd expected. You tilted at 0.2 degrees laterally as you pushed off, had to rush that calculation to compensate. Piece of cake."

"Is that a complaint?" He asked, eyebrow raised

"No, merely an observation." She quipped back, pulling up schematics along with passive radar readings of the tunnel network he was in. "140 more metres until the access hatchway."

It was at times like these that he really appreciated what a monumental asset Smart AI could be in the field. Had Hera not been here, he would never have been able to survive that action. They could analyse data from millions of sources and coalesce them into one coherent display quicker than most people could blink. They were probably the single most important scientific development in the history of Humankind. But this brilliance and utility came at a cost.

"Spartan, is that pity I detect bubbling up in your hippocampus?" She teased "Go back to the admiration, I much prefer it"

"Stop poking around in my head" He grunted, his curiosity piqued "So how much of I'm thinking can you actually read?"

"It's quite the art really, I can sense general emotions pretty well, specific wording? Not so easy. The same with your memories, it's like they're filed away and sorted into some system that I don't know how to use. It'd be like walking into a library and not knowing the Dewey-Grenadi Hexa-Decimal system, but also the books have had all their titles crossed out." She mused, and he almost felt her probing his mind, a cool presence not quite invading, but inquiring, gently knocking on the door of his limbic system.

"Weird" He shook his head as his icon on the heads up display neared that of the access hatch.

He flipped his headlights on and spotted another recess in the shaft wall a little further down, which he squeezed himself into, feeling around the wall to find the edges of the hatch. The damn covenant metal was almost seamless. There it was, a slight indent, he ran his fingers along the groove and smiled.

He unsheathed his combat knife and gently inserted it into the seal, prying the door open until he could fit his fingers in the gap. He sheathed his knife and ripped the hatch open with his bare hands, climbing through the ruined hatchway into pitch blackness.

"Spooky." Hera whispered "The Fleet Master's location should be up this corridor and to the left. Be warned, the Flood's Gravemind has situated itself in another room somewhere in this complex, along with the message we need to retrieve."

He raised his weapon and flicked the barrel-mounted flashlight on, swinging it in slow, careful arcs around the room; it was a standard covenant-designed corridor. Almost every ship was riddled with trapezoidal passageways dimly lit by recessed lighting that in this case was no more. The usual purple and blue sheens of the iridescent metal alloys was not present, replaced by mottled green and yellows. The normal regular shape was corrupted by large round, irregular masses littering the space; Flood biomass spewed from every corner, almost entirely covering the walls and ceiling and carpeting the floor beneath him with dull, sickly flesh. It was a living nightmare.

He dialled up his suit's filters to maximum as his flashlight's wide cone of light highlighted the thick swarm of spores in the air, like specks of dust in a sunbeam.

He trudged through the semi-solid carpet, his boots making a nauseating squelching noise as he walked. "I hope this Fleet Master has a Vacuum suit, otherwise there's no way he's making it out of this place uninfected." He came to a halt by a semi-circular door half-covered by flood tissue. "If he isn't dead already."

Remarkably, this door's edges glowed a pale purple, indicating that it still had power. He approached a small keypad hologram by the door's edge and repeated the sequence of glyphs memorised from Refum. The door swung open smoothly, ripping flood matter from its surface with a ripping noise.

The room beyond was devoid of the now familiar puce deposits; a large cavernous space, the room bore an uncanny resemblance to old pictures of legislative establishments on Earth. The central aisle was flanked on three sides by raised seating, and as he entered further into the room, the door slid smoothly shut behind him and locked. Directly in front of him a raised podium stood proud facing the three walls of seats. The room was largely dark, the only flickerings of light coming from the customary recessed ceiling lights so common amongst Covenant architecture, throwing pale purple shadows across the room from the silhouettes of weapon crates and decorative pikes affixed to the walls.

He scanned the room carefully, switching off his flashlight and relying on his optical sensors to alert him to any targets. They were looking for a Fleet Master Xiras, an incredibly high ranking Sangheili who could turn the tide of the Great Schism against the Brutes and Prophets. He'd not in all his 30 odd years of service come face-to-face with such a high ranking Elite. He was more than tempted to just blow the thing's face off and then claim that the flood had done it. However, he needed the Fleet Master alive to ensure that the Elites wouldn't turn on him, and that they would honour their agreement to expedite whatever message Cortana had prepared for Earth. On balance of probability, he was better off not killing the Fleet Master.

But that didn't mean he had to like it.

"Translation software is live." Hera informed him. The state of the art ONI program would allow him to speak a monotonous version of the most common Sangheili dialect, and for the reply to be roughly translated into English subtitles on his HUD. The system was far from perfect, and according to one Evan Phillips, ONI's top Xeno-linguist, there was a whole myriad of Sangheili dialects and variants that they had not been able to mimic. So he guessed that whatever came out of his helmet speakers would be their version of the Queens English. A ridiculous moniker from a forgotten time.

"Fleet Master, I'm here to help and mean you no harm. I come on behalf of Field Master Refum." He said as calmly as he could with adrenaline coursing through his veins, hoping that the software was intelligent enough to convey his tone.

He awaited the response. The Elite should be in this room. The only way out was by the door through which he'd entered, and Xiras had been in contact with the Spec Ops Elite before he had started his descent. He felt the station around him hum lowly with emergency power.

"Demon! Over here." Came the guttural response from his left, and he swung around to see an enormous Sangheili clad in antique Golden armour, embossed with silver Forerunner glyphs and sequences. _**How many millions of Humans had this officer killed in devotion to these false gods **_He thought, his trigger finger itching as he pointed his rifle down towards the floor and walked slowly forwards.

"Fleet Master, you understand what we are to do?" He asked bluntly, resisting his ingrained and trained instincts.

The towering Elite nodded slowly, and as he stepped into the light Jake noted that he was unusually tall, even for his species, and stood at an impressive 9 feet and change. The warrior clutched a covenant carbine in his three-fingered hands, and had the hilt of an energy sword attacked to his thigh. The hilt looked notably older than the standard military models, and Jake guessed that it was either a ceremonial variant or a specialised one. He breathed a sigh of relief as he noted that the Fleet Master's armour seemed to include a full-head mask, mitigating the threat of spore infection. They were about to burst into the heart of the infection after all.

"How long can your armour provide air for?" He asked, moving with the warrior towards the door.

"2 of your human hours. Enough time to be free of this cursed station and onto the _Conviction_." He spoke.

"Good." He said with a grin, his body betraying the rising excitement he felt at the prospect of what lay at the end of the corridor. "Because we are going to need every minute."

**Corporal Meg Turney, Pelican Dropship Charlie-84, Covenant City of High Charity, 15 minutes earlier**

This had to be the strangest moment of her career. The Pelican ducked and weaved amongst the rooftops in the centre of the city, casting a shadow from the station's artificial star far above them. She fiddled with her harness nervously, marvelling at how calm Staff Sergeant appeared as she smoothly manipulated the flight stick to send them into a gentle bank, bringing them into their final approach vector. Turney handed over control of the chin-mounted 70mm autocannon to the Sergeant and nodded at her, receiving a thumbs up as a receipt. She pushed herself up from the co-pilot's seat and undid her harness, steadying herself at the door to the crew cabin.

"ETA?"

"7 minutes" The French-accented Morin replied behind her full-face flight helmet "Let me know when you want the bay door down."

She nodded and pushed the door release button, which swished open to reveal that the crew bay of the dropship was full to the brim of black-armoured Special Operations Elites, some awkwardly sitting in the seats on either side of the bay, others hunched over standing in the central aisle, all clutching an assortment of menacing weaponry. She gulped back her instinctive and combat-hardened response to kill these things, and proceeded to try and push her way through the throngs of alien legs and waists. The room stank of condensed Elite; a curious blend of old leather and wet dog. It wasn't entirely unpleasant.

She heard the barking of Sangheili language and then the warriors bustled to make way for her like overly-nice commuters on a packed city bus. She walked down this clearing towards the leader of this group; an Elite wearing slightly fancier-looking armour, the only real way that she had known how to distinguish the rank and file of the Sangheili from the officers.

"Are we on schedule?" The leader asked in almost impeccable English. That was the most unnerving thing about him. He sounded like a lower-pitched version of a drill instructor she'd once had.

"5 minutes" She informed him, reaching up to the ceiling of the crew bay and unlatching a ceiling-mounted M247 Machine Gun and swinging it down into its firing position so that it now pointed on a swivel towards the closed crew bay door. She pulled the charging handle backwards and cycled the first round into the chamber, getting a feel for her range of motion.

The Elite nodded and started barking orders in Sangheili, probably some sort of pep talk or something. These Elites were the main attack force on the High Council Chambers, 15 warriors and their leader ready to be dropped into the middle of the Flood Infestation. They were to be aided by a diversionary assault by another set of warriors on the other side of the chambers. The plan was to insert these Sangheili as covertly as possible and provide close air support if necessary. If it wasn't, they were to provide support for the diversionary assault. Either way, she was going to need to know what the limits of the gun were.

The minutes trickled by, and she synchronised the weapon's fire control to her ODST BDU, displaying an accurate ammunition counter and overheat tracker on her HUD. Being in ODST armour had its perks. The light above the crew bay door blinked green and she slapped the release button, causing the ramp to lower with an inaudible pneumatic hiss and show her a view of the rooftops below whizzing past her. She levelled the M247, scanning the rooftops for Flood targets.

Beneath the rooftops, the ever-expanding foliage of Flood Biomatter glistened dully; they were heading into the heart of the Flood's hive-mind. The prevalence of the sickly green/yellow carpet increased as they flew, sometimes highlighted by a large lump of tumour-like mass over a vehicle or building.

Suddenly, the view before her shifted as the Pelican flared upwards, bleeding speed as it lowered into the landing zone. She scanned the nearby buildings for threats as the dropship gently touched down, riding on its shock dampers. The Elites charged out of the crew bay on either side of her, quickly activating their active camouflage and almost disappearing completely from view. The dropship's thrusters whined noisily as it took off as quickly as it had come.

Within a minute they were approaching the diversionary assault, and she could hear heavy explosions and weapons fire grow louder over the incessant noise of the thrusters. The entire airframe around her reverberated the chugging of the nose-mounted gun as Morin opened up on Flood Targets.

"Infantry at our 7 o'clock, behind the tower" Morin's voice came over the comms, and she struggled to find the targets through the haze of spores and gunfire. Crimson and yellow blooms ignited in the miasma, drawing her fire as the ingrained awareness of muzzle flash profiles spurred her to action. Sparks flew up from the sloping surface of the ramp and from the metalwork around her as she realised that whatever was down in the fog was firing projectile weapons, UNSC weapons, at them.

"Fuck you" She growled into her helmet as she thumbed the triggers again, firing a burst of automatic fire at the flashes, thinking of all the friends and comrades she'd lost to this abomination. At first fear had gripped her, paralysed her, the sheer terror of this infection overwhelmed her. But she wasn't afraid anymore. She couldn't afford to be afraid. So she turned it into anger, sheer, barely bridled fury powering her movements as she swung around behind the gun, shooting tracer rounds into the gloom.

"Staff, can you patch the dropship's thermal cameras into my HUD?" She asked in between bursts.

There was a noticeable pause before the pilot replied. "Working on it."

The dropship banked suddenly, momentary weightlessness sending her stomach into her mouth as they avoided a flood-fired rocket. As they levelled out and stabilised, she hooked her BDU into the harness attached to the machine gun, wary of being flung out of the back of the pelican during an intense manoeuvre. As her gaze snapped back to the targets below, her vision bloomed into vibrant colours as the thermal cameras in external mounts in the dropship overlaid their cones of vision onto her HUD. The system was really underused in the UNSC, but it allowed her to single out individual Flood combatants from the battlefield.

They continued like this for some minutes, Morin deftly dodging heavy weapons fire and small arms' while raining death from above with the chin gun, Turney picking off the stragglers with 7.62mm bursts from the open rear crew ramp. They took out swathes of flood Combat forms, decimating their numbers. But in the end it would never be enough. The sheer numbers of the enemy they faced were insurmountable, and the incoming fire became more and more focussed and intense as the Flood learned their tactics. The Elites were not faring well against the superior numbers either. The human dropship responded to many fire support requests, but they were just one pelican against the millions and millions of combatants the flood could bring to bear. One by one the diversionary attack's numbers diminished. They couldn't hold out for long.

**CPO Jacob-209**

"Where the hell are the Elites?" He growled as he paced forwards in the thick air of the high council chambers. One time, the political eladers of the Sangheili, San'Shyuum, Jiralhanae and all other members of the alien hegemony known to the UNSC as the Covenant had met and debated, forging alliances and agreements. This hall had directly led to the almost annihilation of humanity as a species. Nowadays the grand parliament looked a little… Flood-y.

He couldn't even tell what architecture in the room was a layer of flood biomass over existing covenant structures and what was entirely unique Flood design. Every surface was composed of the greasy yellow-brown material that the flood turned all living matter into. His footsteps squelched wetly as he trod through the centre of the infestation, searching in vain for the message device that Cortana had so desperately wanted them to find and deliver to Earth. If it had once lay on the floor of this room, it was doubtless sunken beneath the layers of putrid flesh.

"The Elites are working their way through the complex, they should be here in 2 minutes" Hera calmly said in his mind, and his vision was suddenly criss-crossed with a blue lattice as the AI used his suit's sensors to scan the room for the elusive storage unit. "There, in the alcove."

The overlay in his HUD showed a hard metallic object underneath the carpet, and he ripped and hacked at the covering with his combat knife as the Fleet Master looked on, his energy sword drawn and providing the only light in the whole room. Underneath, cocooned in flood matter, a curved Covenant storage unit, gleaming silver and about the size of a beer bottle. A blue light dappled from a circular button on its surface, and he instinctively pressed it.

Blue light projected itself from the core of the device, which began to hum and vibrate softly in his hand. Photons arranged themselves into a holographic form of a familiar AI avatar; Cortana.

"What the?" He mumbled, but the projection cut him off, speaking in urgent tones.

"Chief!" She said, pacing about on an invisible platform above the device's surface "_High Charity_, the Prophets' Holy City, is on its way to Earth. With an army of _Flood_. I can't tell you everything. It's not safe. The Gravemind... it knows I'm in the system."

Questions buzzed around in his mind, accompanied with fresh dread in the pit of his stomach as he learned of the station's destination. He stifled his voice and watched as Cortana's image span on the spot and addressed an absent Master Chief.

"But it doesn't know about the Portal, where it leads. On the other side, there's a solution. A way to stop the Flood, without firing the remaining Halo rings-" Suddenly her numeral-laced skin flared with brightness as if someone had hooked up a car battery to her, she convulsed in simulated agony and fell to her knees, crying out in pain. She raised her head from the simulated floor, gasping and speaking in an almost whisper "Hurry, Chief... the Ark... there isn't much time."

The message ended, the avatar flickering out of existence and retreating back into the storage device, throwing his face into darkness once more. He took a moment to process what he had just heard. The Flood, this Gravemind, mention of more Halo rings… The Ark. It must be some forerunner ship or installation. A vessel to weather through the great Flood in the Book of Genesis. The Forerunners must have had some sense of humour, naming their vessels and adversaries in the style of religious stories. Then the idiocy of his own thought process dawned on him, the forerunners hadn't named their experiences after human religion, it was the opposite. He wondered if ancient humanity had retained some subconscious knowledge of the Forerunners and their stories, and incorporated them into their developing religious beliefs?

But anthropological quandaries could wait for another day, right now he had to get this message to Earth as soon as possible. From the tone of the message, the very survival of his species could be at stake.

"Elites inbound" Hera muttered, clearly in shock at the revelation they had just witnessed. "Lets get ready to move."

"Demon, we must make our escape, my brothers are crusading to free us." Xiras growled. If the seriousness of the message had gotten to him, he didn't show it. But then, why should he care? The flood was just going to finish what the Covenant had been trying to for the last 30 years.

He stowed the message on a magnetic holster in the small of his back, and readied himself for a fight. He was almost surprised that the two of them had not run into any combatants at all while sneaking through the very heart of the infection.

Of course, it could never be that simple.

The hairs on the back of his neck screamed at him moments before a deep booming bellow sounded from all around them, cutting to his very core and resonating in his head. It was simultaneously deafening and piercing. The only comparable experience he'd had was when he was subjected to some experimental sound-based weaponry for use in crowd control situations. But this was a hundred times more intense and foreboding. As he recovered his senses, a tortured voice composed of a thousand different vocalisations drilled into his brain, numbing his mind.

"At Last I Know Ancilla's Plan,

The Lesser Ark Must Fall,

Your Use Is Ended, You Fought, You Ran,

But I Devour **ALL**"

**Corporal Meg Turney**

"Staff, we need a hot extraction on the double" The Ai's voice echoed on their radio channel as a navigation marker appeared over the lower balcony of the tall complex that was the High Council Chambers.

The action on the ground had been decidedly worrisome in the last few minutes. Exactly 4 minutes and 38 seconds earlier, all enemies had broken contact with the diversionary force and swarmed the High Council Chambers. The Elites had initially advanced after them, but had pulled back and retreated back to their staging grounds in the outskirts of the city. They had stayed on station to extract the strike team, but both her and the Staff Sergeant had been growing increasingly uneasy in the sudden calm. The Pelican had taken more than a few hits, one of the thrusters was smoking profusely and there were multiple fresh scorch marks on the hull. She wasn't even sure that the craft was vacuum-proof anymore.

"Aye aye, ETA 40 seconds" Morin responded, banking sharply left and beginning their approach to the balcony, a wide platform about 100 metres above the city floor. She took the brief time in flight to check her ammo counter, and was dismayed to see that she had less than fifty rounds for the M247 left. She made a mental note to fire conservatively as the pelican spun around in the air so that its open rear ramp door faced the platform. She scanned the area, seeing no sign of either the raiding party nor the flood chasing them, just a single closed door directly in front of her.

They sat there, hovering with just the ramp touching the floor for a few seconds, and then the door burst open in a bloom of blue-tinged flame, throwing the remnants of the door and frame scattering about the pad. She aimed for the centre of the blue smoke and saw a dozen silhouettes illuminated from behind by a kaleidoscope of coloured flashes, blue, green, purples, all looking like lighning flashes in the smoke. From the midst of the maelstrom they burst out, the Chief Petty Officer, the Elite leader and another golden-armoured warrior leading them away from the door, turning occasionally to fire into the ruined doorway.

Her thermal filters were useless in all the heat generated by the explosion, so she switched to visual as the first black-armoured SpecOps Elite stamped into the dropship, clutching a clearly broken arm and limping. As the others began embarking she saw them; a solid mass of flood combatants were struggling to exit the doorway, spilling over each other in their desperate rush to kill the raiding party; combat forms, both human and Elite, along with hideously bloated carrier forms waddling in the fray, to lumbering Juggernauts pounding the floor with its massive weight.

She opened up into the centre of the throng, barely scratching at the number of enemies, shredding flesh just as quickly as it was replaced by other bodies. The last of their party jumped aboard and Morin immediately gunned the throttle, to no apparent effect.

The issue was obvious, during the embarkation of the Elites and the Spartan, giant fleshy tentacles had sprouted as if from nowhere and slithered from underneath the platform and wrapped themselves around the nose of the dropship, anchoring it to the building. So while the Pelican struggled and moaned to escape the situation, it could only make it about 20 feet away from the landing before being violently snapped back by the strength of the bonds.

The Elites and the Spartan began shooting out of the back door, carbine magazines and shell casings clattering around the crew bay. She turned her limited ammunition supply to the nearest tentacle, focussing on the centre of it as her high velocity rounds shredded it to ribbons, tearing it clear in half resulting in the Pelican lurching forwards as it came free. The sudden jerk caused one of the Elites to tumble into the back of her, snapping the safety harness and sending them both outwards down the ramp.

As she fell, she felt an iron grip grab her outstretched glove, and instinctively grabbedthe leg of the Sangheili falling with her. They hung like that for a few seconds, the Elite all the way out of the ramp, held in only via her arm, which screamed in agony as her muscles strained to keep hold. She looked up and saw the golden reflective plane of the Spartan's visor as he hauled them both back into the dropship and slammed on the door close button, sitting her forcefully down in a seat and strapping her in as the adrenaline bled from her system, her vision rapidly untunelling.

It took her a minute to realise that all the black-suited Elites around her were all looking in her direction. She looked up, fighting her instincts to fear these creatures, and cocked her head to one side.

"What?"

The leader, his dual energy swords still active, stepped forward. "You have saved one of our own from certain death, we did not attribute this strength to a human female. You have our thanks" He bowed slightly, lowering his long sauropod neck. The others did the same, and she felt more anxious than ever before. What the hell was she supposed to say to that?

"Good job Corporal." Jake said, nodding, hand still firmly grasping a utility rail on the ceiling. "And good flying Staff." The hint of a smile graced his voice, and she began to feel that the soldier was actually, genuinely enjoying himself. That scared her more that she'd readily admit.

"_Merci_" the pilot chirped as they banked gently to the left. "Where to?"

"Dock 7" The leader growled "To the _Indulgence of Conviction_"

"Copy that, Staff, get us there fast. I have a feeling that the Flood won't be far behind." The Spartan agreed, and another navigation point winked on her HUD, with a distance marker of 120 kilometres. The scale of this station never ceased to amaze her.

"This has been an interesting few days for you Corporal." The Spartan made his way over to her as the Elites tended to each others' wounds and began to reload and prepare. He sat in the bucket seat next to her inspecting a couple of fresh dents and marks on his armour's forearm.

"I don't think I'll ever complain about any mission ever again" She breathed, chuckling as her body wound down from the amped-up combat response.

"Well, my mom used to tell me that 'Nothing worth having ever came easy'" He said, absent-mindedly stripping and cleaning his MA5C next to her.

She raised an eyebrow "Could anything be worth the trouble we've already been through?"

"More than you know, Corporal." He said, clearly troubled by whatever had happened in the chambers. "More than you know."


End file.
